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Book C3Z&6 



Copyright}! . 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE HOLY GRAIL 



By tke Same Author 

FOUR PRINCES ; Or, The Growth 
of a Kingdom. The story of the 
Christian Church. Decorated cloth, 
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from the painting by george frederick watts 

sir Galahad's quest of the grail 

" My strength is as the strength of ten, 
Because my heart is pure." 

—Tennyson, " Sir Galahad. 



?* 



Copyright, 1905 
By J. B. LippiNCOTT Company 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 11 1905 

Copyright Entry 
AJZtx.//. /90f\ 
CLASS CX. XXc, No. 

/ 33/3? 

COPY B. 



Published December, 



[905 



Printed by 
J. B. Lippineott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 



8 



DEDICATED TO 

THE CHARLESTONIANS 

IN TOKEN OF 
LASTING FRIENDSHIP 



PREFACE 

I intend the Holy Grail to be the bind- 
ing theme that unites this sheaf of essays 
and addresses. The first bears that espe- 
cial title, but the quest of the Grail is no 
less the real motive of the five other chap- 
ters in this book. For example, no men 
since the days of Galahad and Percivale 
have more utterly lost themselves in the 
knightly quest than those two Southern 
poets whose early death deprived the 
world of mystical rich music, but brought 
them their vision at last. The Crusaders 
were knights of the Grail. " Liberty and 
law" shows the present need of lance and 
spear, while the final chapter hints of a 
Golden Age to come. I pray that my 



10 Preface 

little book may somehow hearten some 
of those who wander, and point them 
straightwise towards The Gleam. This is 
its single aim. 

James A. B. Scherer. 
Newberry College, S. C. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Holy Grail 15 

Henry Timrod 55 

Sidney Lanier 73 

The Crusaders 115 

Liberty and Law 153 

The Century in Literature 181 



THE HOLY GRAIL 



THE HOLY GRAIL* 

A TRIBUTE AND AN APPEAL 

Some one asked a child on a door-step, 
"Is your father at home?" The house 
was that of a village physician. 

" No ; he is away," answered the child. 

" Can you tell me where I can find 
him?" 

" No ; but he is somewhere, where 
somebody is either sick or hurt; he is 
helping somewhere." 

And the caller went away with a beau- 
tiful sermon in his heart. " Helping 
somewhere!" 

There is beauty in a life of service. 

It solves one of the great problems that 
weigh upon the minds of men in these 

* Delivered before the Medical College of 
South Carolina. 

15 



16 The Holy Grail 

days — the problem of inequality. Here 
are the rich, there are the poor ; here are 
the weak, there are the strong. The high 
and the lowly, the crushed and these who 
crush them, the maimed and wan against 
the ruddy and the glad ; what a vast rid- 
dle lies in this universal fact of human in- 
equality ! The saddest feature of it is that 
the weak themselves so keenly realize 
their weakness. They have not even that 
poor bliss which ignorance is said to bring. 
They are consciously unequal. On the 
other hand, never before has this fact of 
inequality been so fully realized by the 
brothers of the weak. " Never before 
have men felt the sorrows and hardships 
of their fellow men so widely, so keenly, 
so constantly, as to-day." 

The solution is in service. In a per- 
fectly equal world service would be mani- 
festly impossible. It implies inequalities. 
And were service impossible, the noblest 



The Holy Grail 17 

fruitfulness of the human soul, the high- 
est attainment of human character, would 
perforce be unachieved. To each is given 
his individual talent, which is to be spent 
in service for the common weal. Brain 
and brawn, music and money, letters, me- 
chanics, sciences and arts — there are di- 
versities of gifts, but the same spirit, the 
spirit of service, should animate all, and 
so achieve at once the common weal and 
the highest individual development. " He 
that would be chief among you, let him be 
as one that doth serve." Herein is hap- 
piness, herein is health and hope. If vice 
be the shadow of idleness, service is ir- 
radiant of virtue. " Ich dien" is indeed 
a princely motto; and true princes in the 
realm of service are the men who go forth 
night and day, in storm and sunshine, 
through evil and through good report, 
into mansions and hovels, wherever some 
one is sick or hurt, helping somewhere; 



18 The Holy Grail 

serving, always serving. Carlyle writes of 
the hero as prophet, the hero as poet, the 
hero as priest, as man of letters, as king. 
He did not need to write a chapter on 
the hero as a healer, since such a chapter 
is written in every human heart where 
burns the faintest spark of gratitude for 
such as serve. Then, 

Health to the art whose glory is to give 
The crowning boon that makes it life to live ! 

I said that service is irradiant, but the 
statement must be qualified. Service does 
not always bless either the servant or the 
served. Serve we must; yet there are 
those who serve faithfully, but cheer- 
lessly. There are physicians, for ex- 
ample, who bring skill and constancy 
and good medicines and deep learning 
into the sick-room, but they do not 
bring warmth, nor are their own hearts 
warm. On the other hand, there is the 
immoral character of William McClure, 



The Holy Grail 19 

whose home is not only beside the bon- 
nie brier bush, but also beneath Southern 
palmettos. The one man may be per- 
fect; but even so, he is painfully perfect 
— precise, cool, chilling, mechanical. He 
is "the doctor"— Dr. Fell. We may 
stand in awe of him, but we do not love 
him; we rather have that shuddering 
fear of him which love casts out. See 
him, this fell physician, with his saw-like 
face and his saw-like voice and his sur- 
geon's saw, unsheathed, forever taking 
conspicuously the place of his knightly 
sword. How he loves to brandish his 
saw, unmindful of shrinking nerves! 
Harsh, skilful, saw-like Dr. Fell! 

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, 
The reason why I cannot tell ; 

But this I know, I know full well : 
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. 

The other man (may his tribe increase) 
is " our friend, Dr. McClure." How 



20 The Holy Grail 

proud we are to call him that! Warm- 
hearted, cheery, wholesome Dr. McClure! 
The one man may help the body, but the 
other helps the body and the soul, because 
he has a soul himself. It is the difference 
between the music of a street organ and 
the music of a woman's voice. Service is 
always music. But it may be mechanical, 
or it may be mellow with light. 

I despair of making my meaning clear 
without recourse to a legend.* 

This legend is the simplest form of the 
story known as Percivale, or the Holy 
Grail. Simple as it is, this story has had 
a deeper influence upon literature than 
any other legend in the world. Familiar 
to the people of Western Britain before 
their conversion to Christianity, it was 

* Besides Tennyson and Malory, I am indebted 
in this study of the Grail chiefly to the excel- 
lent essays by George McLean Harper and Ferris 
Greenslet — S. 



The Holy Grail 21 

seized upon by the religious romancers of 
the twelfth century and transformed into 
a Christian legend. Since that time it has 
formed the theme for the greatest of epic 
poems, whether in French, Welsh, Eng- 
lish, German, Icelandic, or Flemish. Its 
influence was profound, showing itself 
especially in spiritualizing the Arthurian 
narratives, which had previously been of 
a worldly, and even sensual, character. 
During the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 
teenth centuries it was the mission of the 
legend of the Holy Grail to fill the strong, 
deep current of Arthurian romance with 
purity and light. " Then the Renaissance, 
which was springing to so many fields 
of thought, fell like a polar night on these 
shining floods of fair mediaeval story. The 
legend of the Holy Grail, which had 
leaped down in tiny rivulets from the high 
antiquity of so many races, and had 
cleansed and beautified the literatures of 



22 The Holy Grail 

so many tongues — this purifying stream 
lay frozen throughout the sixteenth, 
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. 
Suddenly, in our own time, it has been 
irradiated and warmed to life again and 
to the old genial motion." 

But what is the legend? Lately one 
has retold it in the beauty of its simplest 
form: 

They say that a banished queen, widow 
of a king slain in combat, dwelt in the 
wild-wood with her little son. His child- 
hood was spent in companionship with 
the birds of the forest. He loved them 
and understood their language. One day 
he met several knights in a green glade 
and was fascinated by the splendor of 
their arms and by what they told him of 
their wandering life. Following their ex- 
ample, he, too, set forth to conquer the 
world. He soon reached a bewitched 
castle, upon which some dreadful woe 



The Holy Grail 23 

had fallen. A wounded man, called the 
Fisher King, lay there speechless, but 
supplicating relief with great sorrowful 
eyes. At regular intervals there is borne 
before this sufferer a sacred vessel, bathed 
in a holy light, at sight of which the king 
and his attendants look expectantly to- 
wards the simple Percivale. But he has 
been taught pridefully never to ask ques- 
tions, and so he leaves the castle to its 
fate. If he had only had sufficient in- 
terest in this mystery to speak of it, the 
Fisher King would have been healed. 
Percivale now goes forth to many more 
adventures, but is ever haunted by pity 
for the king and regret of his own for- 
bearance. At length he learns from a 
hermit that the sacred vessel was the Holy 
Grail, and devotes himself henceforth to 
searching for the castle in hopes of re- 
pairing his fault. After many years he 
finds it again, but now the spell is not so 



24 The Holy Grail 

easily unbound. He must first weld to- 
gether the parts of a broken sword. 
When this is finally done, and when he 
asks the searching duplex question, 
"What ails thee, O King? And what 
mean these wondrous things?" — then the 
Fisher King recovers, hailing Percivale as 
his deliverer and the chief defender of the 
Grail. 

But what is the significance of this leg- 
end of the Holy Grail? Briefly, this 
seems to me to be its meaning: To men 
who, getting and spending, are laying 
waste their powers; in days when the 
world is too much with us, every way, 
this fertile bit of folk-lore comes to us 
as a reminder of spiritual needs and privi- 
leges. It comes as a warning lest, in 
our daily dealings with the material 
world, we forget the wonders of the ideal 
land. To the caretakers of the body it 
comes as a warning lest, in dealing with 



The Holy Grail 25 

the materia medica, they lose sight of the 
truth that " in the cloud of the human 
soul there is a fire stronger than the light- 
ning and a grace more precious than the 
ram." Serve we must. That which en- 
nobles service is a belief in the ideal and 
the spiritual. 

My message, then, is an appeal for the 
ideal against the material and gross. My 
voice is a voice crying against the threat- 
ening triumph of materialism over the 
spiritual. Service may be hard and cold, 
or it may be full of all sweetness and light, 
both for ourselves and for others. The 
light that transforms it, making it a bless- 
ing to oneself and a strong uplifting force 
to other men, is the light which Tennyson, 
the aged, called The Gleam. 

This great man's theory of service was 
altogether a wholesome and practical the- 
ory. He had no patience with the silly 
folk who will only dream and drone. He 



26 The Holy Grail 

taught that no man, for the simple sake of 
seeing visions, many wander from the 
allotted field before his work be done; 
that even the king is but the hind to 
whom a space of land is given to plough. 
He did not let himself fall into that pretty 
net of a lazy and sentimental philosophy 
whose motto is : Be, not Do. He taught 
that none can nobly be who will not faith- 
fully do. But he saw, too, that service 
may be dark and hard, missing its highest 
end, both for the servant and the served. 
Therefore, as this gray magician, who so 
long had enchanted the world with his 
music, was about to turn again home, he 
shouted the secret of his noble life of 
service to all young mariners ready to 
launch out into the deep. 

O young Mariner, 
You from the haven 
Under the sea-cliff, 
You that are watching 
The gray Magician 



The Holy Grail 27 

With eyes of wonder, 

I am Merlin, 

And I am dying, 

I am Merlin 

Who follow The Gleam . . . 

Not of the sunlight, 

Not of the moonlight, 

Not of the starlight ! 

O young Mariner, 

Down to the haven 

Call your companions, 

Launch your vessel, 

And crowd your canvas, 

And, ere it vanishes 

Over the margin, 

After it, follow it, 

Follow The Gleam. 

That is my message — follow The 
Gleam ! Now, " ere it vanishes over the 
margin, after it, follow it, follow The 
Gleam !" 

Let me show you the remarkable adap- 
tation of the Percivale legend to inculcate 
this message. I have cited the story of 
the Grail in its simplest form, precisely as 



28 The Holy Grail 

it stands written in ancient romances, 
without the slightest addition or altera- 
tion. Yet when we come to apply it to 
this present occasion, and to our own 
needs, it is hard to believe that it has not 
been purposely adjusted, so perfectly does 
it fit them. 

Here is the lad, Percivale. His child- 
hood has been spent in all simplicity and 
purity. One day he heeds the voices of 
the knights of healing, and resolves to go 
out into the world in their noble com- 
pany. It is not far to the doomed castle, 
whereon some dreadful woe seems to have 
fallen. You will not be long in your pro- 
fessions before there comes an oppressive 
sense of the misery that fills the world. 
Here he lies, the Fisher King. Only a 
poor fisherman, perhaps — toilsome, suf- 
fering, helpless, conscious of his weakness 
and his wounds; yet still a king! Here 
he lies, patient, and supplicating relief, 



The Holy Grail 29 

with great dumb imploring eyes. Will 
you make the mistake of the other Per- 
civale? Shall this dumb and wounded 
Fisher King see in our eyes no interest 
in the sacred and the spiritual? If you 
ask for the body's sake, " What ails 
thee?" will you not also show interest in 
the " wondrous things" of the soul? As 
the visions of the higher life pass ever and 
anon before his apprehension now quick- 
ened by suffering, shall he discern from 
sympathetic touch and glance that these 
things are gloriously true, or shall a hard, 
mechanical materialism chill these holy 
visions of his into a haunting nightmare? 
Be sure that unless an interest and a faith 
in the spiritual and the unseen illume your 
service to the Fisher King, you will go 
forth and leave him still wounded, 
whereas you might have healed and freed 
him. Then, years afterwards, you may 
seek remorsefully to repair your fault and 



30 The Holy Grail 

crime against the Fisher King. But now, 
alas! the spell is not so easily unbound; 
one must first weld together the parts 
of a broken sword. Ah, keen, unbroken 
sword of knightly and believing youth ! 
Wield it, and it grows the stronger and 
the brighter. Leave it unused, and it 
weakens, rusts, breaks. 

There is no sadder proof of this than 
in the experience of the great scientist, 
Charles Darwin. One of his letters con- 
tains a remarkable confession, strange and 
pathetic. " In one respect," he says, " my 
mind has changed during the last twenty 
or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, 
or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such 
as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, 
gave me great pleasure, and even as a 
schoolboy I took intense delight in 
Shakespeare. I have also said that for- 
merly pictures gave me considerable, and 



The Holy Grail 31 

music very great delight. But now for 
many years I cannot endure to read a line 
of poetry. I have tried lately to read 
Shakespeare and found it so intolerably 
dull that it nauseated me. I have also 
almost lost my taste for pictures or music. 
Music generally sets me thinking too en- 
ergetically on what I have been at work 
on, instead of giving me pleasure. I re- 
tain some taste for fine scenery, but it does 
not cause me the exquisite delight which 
it once did. My mind seems to have be- 
come a kind of machine for grinding gen- 
eral laws out of large collections of facts, 
but why this should have caused the 
atrophy of that part of the brain alone on 
which the higher tastes depend I cannot 
conceive. If I had to live my life again 
I would have made a rule to read some 
poetry and listen to some music at least 
once every week; for, perhaps, the part 
of my brain now atrophied would thus 



32 The Holy Grail 

have been kept active through use. The 
loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, 
and may possibly be injurious to the in- 
tellect, and more probably to the moral 
character, by enfeebling the emotional 
part of our nature." 

I will venture to say that the profes- 
sion into which you go will expose you 
to the same danger that eventually so sad- 
dened this, great and honest scientist. In 
dealing with mere facts there is always 
a tendency to forget truth. Phenomena 
conceal realities. You will be busied in- 
cessantly with drugs and bones and nerves 
and tissues. Thinking so much about the 
body, you may be tempted to forget the 
soul. It will be easy to develop the purely 
intellectual faculties at the expense of 
those powers on which the very highest 
tastes and pleasures depend. Moreover, 
you and I are born into an age of mate- 
rialism; an age when it is hard to main- 



The Holy Grail 33 

tain the vision of the spiritual. The mal- 
aria of materialism forms a mist, a fog, 
wherein the spirit moves, heavy and be- 
wildered. " Things that are near loom 
larger in the mist. Things that are far 
are lost to view." " Men are confused, 
hesitating, questioning, despondent, in re- 
gard to all that lies beyond the reach of 
the senses." Materialism is the only re- 
ligion that some will hear of; teaching 
that the first cause is some blind pulp, — 
the final cause, dust and ashes. The gen- 
esis of man, they tell us, is through the 
earthworm, who also shall devour him. 
It is, I say, a materialistic age, and the 
mist of doubt will tend to blind you to the 
sight of things that are far, but real; 
especially since your sight will perforce 
be so closely and constantly directed to- 
wards the things that are near by. 

But that is not all. The most of you 
will belong to one of those four profes- 
3 



34 The Holy Grail 

sions that get the closest views of human 
nature. The lawyer, the editor, the min- 
ister and the physician see things that 
other men barely suspect. The physician, 
I believe, sees, most of all, the weaknesses 
of humanity, with its innumerable faults 
and foibles. You will feel the sting of in- 
gratitude ; you may feel the sting of pov- 
erty. You may even feel the double sting 
of an undeserved poverty, begotten of the 
ingratitude of those for whom you labor. 
All of these things, the scientific character 
of your profession, the intimate knowl- 
edge that it gives of the dark and seamy 
side of life, and the character of the age in 
which we live, will tend strongly, as it 
seems to me, to make you strangers to 
" the wonders of the ideal land" whereof 
Timrod sings. 

Learn a lesson from Timrod. If ever 
a high and beautiful spirit was tempted to 
lose faith in the ideal and the spiritual, 



The Holy Grail 35 

that temptation came to Henry Timrod. 
The maturer years of his life form a sick- 
ening record of one long wrestling with 
cruelty, famine, and disease. Concerning 
his sweet minstrelsy, which was infinitely 
dear to him, hunger made him once write 
to his friend, Paul Hayne, that he would 
" consign every line of it to eternal ob- 
livion for one hundred dollars in hand." 
It was an awful fight between Beauty and 
the Beast, but the beauty of his spirit 
survived. Willing to destroy all his poetry 
for a little bread and bacon, the poetry of 
life yet remained priceless and triumphant 
with him. Wet with his tears and blood 
he has left us a song that glows with the 
dazzling fire of an inextinguishable hope 
and faith. In the midst of his wrestling 
with the horrible realities of his sad life, 
as he realized the danger which beset him 
of losing all that makes life worth while, 
he cried out in a very agony of earnest- 
ness: 



36 The Holy Grail 

Dear God ! if that I may not keep through life 

My trust, my truth, 
And that I must, in yonder endless strife, 

Lose faith with youth; 

If the same toil which indurates the hand 

Must steel the heart, 
Till in the wonders of the ideal land 

It have no part; 

Oh, take me hence! I would no longer stay 

Beneath the sky; 
Give me to chant one pure and deathless lay, 

And let me die ! * 

In speaking of Timrod, my thought 
naturally recurs to his great master, Ten- 
nyson, and I recall his striking testimony 
to the reality of the things unseen, when 
in conversation he once said : " There 
are moments when the flesh is nothing to 
me, when I feel and know the flesh to be 
the vision, God and the spiritual the only 
real and true. Depend upon it, the spir- 

* " Youth and Manhood." 



The Holy Grail 37 

itual is the real; it belongs to one more 
than the hand and the foot. You may tell 
me that my hand and foot are only imag- 
inary symbols of my existence. I could 
believe you, but you never, never can con- 
vince me that the I is not an eternal re- 
ality, and that the spiritual is not the true 
and real part of me." His son adds that 
he spoke these words with such passionate 
earnestness that a solemn stillness fell on 
them all as he left the room. 

It is little wonder that this great man, 
with his prophet's vision of the spiritual 
as the truly real, should be the foremost 
of all the poets, in many tongues and cen- 
turies, who have dealt with the glorious 
story of the Grail. This theme appealed 
to him, as he himself has told us, because 
it gave such rich opportunity to express 
his " strong feeling as to the reality of the 
Unseen." First, it is Percivale's sister, a 
nun, who sees the vision. 



38 The Holy Grail 

. . . " O my brother Percivale," she said, 
" Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail : 
For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound 
As of a silver horn from o'er the hills 
Blown, and I thought, ' It is not Arthur's use 
To hunt by moonlight;' and the slender sound, 
As from a distance beyond distance grew, 
Coming upon me — O never harp nor horn, 
Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with 

hand, 
Was like that music as it came; and then 
Stream'd thro' my cell a cold and silver beam, 
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail, 
Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive, 
Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed 
With rosy colors leaping on the wall ; 
And then the music faded, and the Grail 
Past, and the beam decay'd, and from the walls 
The rosy quiverings died into the night." 

Next the wonderful vision comes veiled 
to all the knights of Arthur, as they sit 
feasting in their great hall at the Table 
Round. 

A cracking and a riving of the roofs, 
And all at once, as there we sat, we heard 



The Holy Grail 39 

And rending, and a blast, and overhead 

Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 

And in the blast there smote along the hall 

A beam of light seven times more clear than day : 

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 

All over cover'd with a luminous cloud, 

And none might see who bare it, and it past. 

Then it is the pure Galahad who de- 
scribes to Percivale his success in the 
noble quest. 

... I, Galahad, saw the Grail, . . . 
. . . and never yet 

Hath what thy sister taught me first to see, 
This Holy Thing, fail'd from my side, nor come 
Cover'd, but moving with me night and day, 
Fainter by day, but always in the night 
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh 
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top 
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode, 
Shattering all evil customs everywhere. 

Then Percivale himself, drawn by the 
power of Galahad, attains the unveiled 
vision. He sees Galahad clad " in silver- 



40 The Holy Grail 

shining armor starry-clear," embarked at 
night upon the stormy sea. As the thun- 
ders roar, the heavens open with blaze of 
lightning, and reveal to the watcher on 
the shore Sir Galahad asail. 

And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung 
Redder than any rose, a joy to me, 
For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn. 
Then in a moment when they blazed again 
Opening, I saw the least of little stars 
Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star 
I saw the spiritual city and all her spires 
And gateways in a glory like one pearl — 
No larger, tho' the goal of all the saints — 
Strike from the sea ; and from the star there shot 
A rose-red sparkle to the city, and there 
Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail. 

The vision, too, was granted to the hon- 
est, simple-minded Bors, who scarce had 
prayed or asked it for himself, so hum- 
ble was he; yet, nevertheless, one night 
before his sight " the sweet Grail glided 
and past, and close upon it pealed a shrap, 
quick thunder." 



The Holy Grail 41 

Then at last the veiled vision of the sin- 
tormented Lancelot! Cursed with an 
overpowering unholy love, he rode madly 
on the quest, hoping that could he but 
touch or see the Holy Grail his sin and 
spirit might be plucked asunder. At 
length, cast ashore from a mad and peril- 
ous voyage, he found an enchanted castle, 
lion-guarded. Up between the lions he 
pressed in the moonlit night — up a thou- 
sand steps, panting, towards where, in the 
topmost tower to the eastward, a sweet 
voice sang clear and high as a lark. 

... As in a dream I seem'd to climb 
For ever ; at the last I reach' d a door ; 
A light was in the crannies, and I heard, 
" Glory and joy and honor to our Lord, 
And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail." 
Then in my madness I essay'd the door; 
It gave; and thro' a stormy glare, a heat 
As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I, 
Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was, 
With such a fierceness that I swoon'd away — 
O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, 



42 The Holy Grail 

All pall'd in crimson samite, and around 
Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. 
And but for all my madness and my sin, 
And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw 
That which I saw ; but what I saw was veil'd 
And cover'd ; and this Quest was not for me. 

Alas, for the blinding power of a wil- 
ful sin! And yet he saw it, although 
veiled. Not alone the retired and holy 
nun had this glorious vision; not alone 
the maiden Sir Galahad and the wander- 
ing Percivale, but also the simple-minded 
Bors and the wrestling Lancelot. Be 
sure that the Quest is for all who are will- 
ing to seek it. 

O young Mariner, 
Down to the haven 
Call your companions, 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it, 
Follow The Gleam. 



The Holy Grail 43 

There is no way by which this faith in 
the good, the true and the beautiful may 
better be kept living and warm than by the 
way of literature. Of course I do not 
speak of the literature that belongs espe- 
cially to professions. Chaucer's " doctour 
of phisik" was thoroughly grounded in 
that. 

Wei knew he the olde Esculapius, 
And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus ; 
Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen; 
Serapion, Razis, and Avycen; 
Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn; 
Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn, 

so that " in al this world ne was ther noon 
him lyk, to spek of phisik and of sur- 
gerye." And yet, despite this expert 
technical knowledge, he had fallen deep 
into this very error, against which the 
great voices all sound warning. We 
know this, because 



44 The Holy Grail 

He kepte that he wan in pestilence. 
For gold in phisik is a cordial; 
Therefore he loved gold in special. 

Nay, I do not mean the technical lit- 
erature of your professions. I speak 
rather of what is sometimes called, with 
a sneer, " mere belles lettres" If, in the 
wonders of the ideal land, you are to have 
a part, you dare not slight the pleasant 
paths of the great English classics. Re- 
member Darwin's regret that he had not 
read some poetry at least once every week, 
and so supplied a tonic to prevent, in the 
pursuit of a purely scientific profession, 
the atrophy of those faculties upon which 
the higher tastes depend. As a very dis- 
cerning philosopher has put it, to acquire 
a love for the best poetry, and a just un- 
derstanding of it, is the chief end of the 
study of literature. " For it is by means 
of poetry that the imagination is quick- 
ened, nurtured, and invigorated, and it is 



The Holy Grail 45 

only through the exercise of the imagina- 
tion that a man can live a life that is in a 
true sense worth living. For it is the im- 
agination which lifts him from the petty, 
transient, and physical interests that en- 
gross the greater part of his time and 
thoughts in self-regarding pursuits, to the 
large, permanent, and spiritual interests 
that ennoble his nature, and transform 
him from a solitary individual into a 
member of the brotherhood of the human 



race. 



» * 



Do not say that you have no time for 
letters ; the mind to read finds the time to 
read. And so the danger is not that you 
will not find the time, but that you may, 
like Darwin, lose the mind for it. Some 
of our great English-speaking physicians, 
from Sir Thomas Browne to Oliver Wen- 
dell Holmes and Weir Mitchell, have 

* Charles Eliot Norton. 



46 The Holy Grail 

proved that there is no necessary disparity 
between medicine and letters. 

As a second influence in maintaining a 
clear vision of The Gleam, of the spiritual 
realities of life, I would name chivalry. 
By chivalry I mean nothing else than a 
steadfast belief in the purity and nobility 
of womanhood. I am selfish in this ad- 
vice. What I mean is this : There is no 
danger that woman will ever lose the 
vision of the things unseen; her percep- 
tion is keener than ours, her spiritual hori- 
zon wider; now, by a steadfast belief in 
her and her ideals, we can have our own 
kept true through her sweet aid. It is not 
without a profound significance that the 
maiden nun belted Sir Galahad as he set 
forth on his quest for the Holy Grail. 
Shearing away clean from her forehead all 
her wealth of hair, out of this she plaited 
broad and long a strong sword-belt. 



The Holy Grail 47 

. . . and wove with silver thread 

And crimson in the belt a strange device, 

A crimson grail within a silver beam; 

And saw the bright boy-knight, and bound it on 

him, 
Saying, " My knight, my love, my knight of 

heaven, 
O thou, my love, whose love is one with mine, 
I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt. 
Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen, 
And break thro' all, till one will crown thee 

king 
Far in the spiritual city ;" and as she spake 
She sent the deathless passion in her eyes 
Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind 
On him, and he believed in her belief. 

Chivalry, literature, and religious faith 
— these three are the prismatic elements 
of the deathless gleam of the Holy Grail. 
He who holds to these finds his quest; 
and the greatest of these is faith. Chau- 
cer says of his " doctour" that " his studie 
was but litel on the Bible." After that 
illuminating bit of information we cannot 



48 The Holy Grail 

wonder that he " loved gold in special" 
and " kepte that he wan in pestilence." 
For in the end it is religious faith that 
lies at the root of all true charity and no- 
bility of life. I have spoken of chivalry; 
I remind you that the source of chivalry 
was the Crusades, and the Crusades were 
nothing but religious wars. I have spoken 
of literature; I remind you of that Book 
which is the permeating force of all our 
truest literature, the Book that Walter 
Scott, on his death-bed, called the only 
book. I have spoken of Tennyson; I 
recall an extract from Queen Victoria's 
private journal, under date of August 7, 
1883, where she is describing a visit which 
the great poet had just paid her. " He 
talked of the many friends he had lost and 
what it would be if he did not feel and 
know that there was another world, where 
there would be no partings; and then he 
spoke with horror of the unbelievers and 
philosophers who would make you believe 



The Holy Grail 49 

that there was no other world, no immor- 
tality, who tried to explain all away in a 
miserable manner." I spoke of Timrod; 
his poems glow with religious faith. So 
with Sir Thomas Browne and Holmes and 
all the great men mentioned in this talk 
about the Holy Grail. What is the Holy 
Grail itself? A religious cup bathed in 
spiritual light. The spiritual and the ideal 
cannot exist apart from the religious. 

This truth is beautifully told by one 
of the minnesingers, who dealt with the 
legend of the Holy Grail. He paints the 
lad, Percivale, at his mother's side, before 
he had set forth to journey towards the 
doomed castle in the company of knights. 
He had lived in the wild-wood, innocent 
and joyous, loving the birds and all things 
God hath made. One day, in pain for 
the wounded birds, he hears his mother 
speak the great Name of the Creator of 
all, and, looking up into her face, he asks 



50 The Holy Grail 

the mighty question, " O mother, what is 
God?" Her answer is one of deep beauty 
and tenderness : 

My son, in solemn truth I say, 

He is far brighter than the day, 

Though once His countenance did change 

Into the face of man. 

O son of mine, give wisely heed, 

And call on Him in time of need, 

Whose faithfulness has never failed 

Since first the world began. 

Forget not this lesson of the mother as 
you go out into the high and holy knight- 
hood of service; let not faith falter. Be 
sure that there is a God. We discern His 
likeness brightening the page of history, 
with the illumination of a single divine 
purpose, governing and directing all; 
that " divinity which shapes our ends, 
rough-hew them how we will." There is 
a God. We see Him in the blue vault of 
the sky, we feel Him in the touch of a 
mother's hand, in the kiss of a child's pure 



The Holy Grail 51 

lips. We hear Him in the still, small voice 
that whispers to the heart, Thou shalt, or 
Thou shalt not. 

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with 

spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 

hands and feet. 

In Him will I believe. In the good, the 
beautiful and the true will I believe. In 
the wonders of the ideal land I will seek 
to hold my part. Follow The Gleam! 
Now, ere it vanishes over the margin; 
now, in our strong youth, let us after it, 
follow it — the vision of a sacred vessel 
bathed with light, the vision of the Holy 
Grail, which, if you hold it ever in sight, 
will bless and lift your lives and, through 
you, unbind and heal the wounded Fisher 
King. 

And now, fair Sirs, your voices : who will gird 
His belt for travel in the perilous ways? 
This thing must be fulfilled: in vain our land 



52 The Holy Grail 

Of noble name, high deed, and famous men, 

Vain the proud homage of our thrall the sea, 

If we be shorn of God ; — ah, loathsome shame ! 

To hurl in battle for the pride of arms ; 

To ride in native tourney, foreign war; 

To count the stars ; to ponder pictured runes, 

And grasp great knowledge, as the demons do, — 

If we be shorn of God; — we must assay 

The myth and meaning of this marvellous bowl 

It shall be sought and found * 

* Robert Stephen Hawker. 



HENRY TIMROD 



HENRY TIMROD 

A CAROLINA POET 

Matthew Arnold's pregnant criti- 
cism of America, that it needs ruins, 
hardly applies to old Charleston, which 
was a city when New York was a town. 
The place wears that quiet dignity which 
comes only with the heaping years. It 
has the calm culture whereof Arnold was 
so fond, but whose price is ruins. Its 
gray hairs are its glory-crown. 

From the ocean it is Wilhelm Muller's 
sunken city, seeming to rise from the sea. 
Ancient spires gleam white in the South- 
ern sun, under a turquoise sky. Nearing, 
you see no vulgar showiness of piled-up 
brownstone, but the simple elegance of 
snowy, slender columns fronting the open 
doors of ancient homes. It is not Amer- 

55 



56 The Holy Grail 

ica, it is Europe; not the new world, but 
the old. 

The churches can trace back their his- 
tories to a time when letter-heads were 
dated 16 — instead of 19 — . One of them 
is a Huguenot church, founded by refu- 
gees, and still worshipping with its un- 
changed historic liturgy. The St. Cecilia 
Society, oldest social organization in 
America, was founded in 1761, and the 
Charleston Library dates from 1748. 
There is a Hibernian Society, organized 
in 1 701; one of Scotchmen, founded 
1729; and a " German Friendly Society," 
organized in 1766. 

The early roll of this German Friendly 
Society bears the name of Henry Timrod 
(grandfather of his great namesake), 
who became a member in 1772. William, 
his only son, was born of a Scotch 
mother, thus uniting those two diverse ele- 
ments which Professor Morley likes to 



Henry Timrod 57 

trace in English literature, — Teutonic and 

Keltic. At the age of eleven William's 

love of books literally bound him to a 

bookbinder, whom he startled one day in 

Nullification times with an outburst of 

patriotic poetry. While writing good 

verse, the bookbinder, William Timrod, 

never became more than a man of letters, 

bequeathing the bud of his poetic genius 

to a gentle son, in whom it blossomed into 

fairest and fullest flower, his immortelle. 

Henry Timrod was born in the city of 

Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 

1829. A studious schoolboy, he had as 

desk-mate and always warmest friend, 

Paul Hamilton Hayne, who prepared for 

the second edition of Timrod's poems 

(in 1873) a memoir to which the present 

writer is indebted.* " Harry" was a sen- 

* The edition has long been out of print, and 
rare. A third appeared in 1899, brought out by 



58 The Holy Grail 

sitive, passionate lad, shy save with inti- 
mate friends. Poetic tastes appeared early, 
the natural fruitage of his temperament. 
His warm delight in nature, inherited 
doubtless from his beautiful English 
mother, gave him that power which marks 
the poet from his fellows: the power to 
interpret rather than merely describe. 
He wrote verses when but a child, and 
later, while a student at the University 
of Georgia, pretty love-fancies appeared 
from his pen in the Charleston News. 
But ill health and poverty brought him 
away from school an undergraduate. For 
a while he studied law, then set about pre- 
paring to be a teacher. Yet ever while 
fighting the wolf, his whole heart yearned 
towards poetry. Hayne draws a graphic 
picture of him reciting Wordsworth's 

Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., for the Timrod 
Memorial Association. 



Henry Timrod 59 

" Intimations," his favorite poem : " Short 
of stature, but broad-chested, and com- 
pactly formed, with his superb head well 
set upon shoulders erect, and thrown back 
in haughty grace — his gray eyes flashing, 
and his swarthy face one glow of intense 
emotion — it was impossible to listen to 
him without catching some spark of his 
fiery enthusiasm." 

Another literary friend of Timrod's 
was Gilmore Simms. The young poet, 
during his ten years of school-teaching in 
the " up-country," was frequently one of 
the cultured coterie whom Simms, " like 
a literary Nestor, gathered about him in 
his hospitable home." Timrod wrote at 
this time for the Southern Literary Mes- 
senger, under the name of " Aglaiis," and 
for a short-lived journal edited by Hayne, 
known as Russell's Magazine. This mag- 
azine contains essays which show his the- 



60 The Holy Grail 

ories of art.* In defending the sonnet as 
a form of expression, he ridicules those 
who, regarding poetry as the " outgush- 
ing of a present emotion, cannot conceive 
how the poet, carried on by the ' divine 
afflatus,' should always contrive to rein 
in his Pegasus at a certain goal." Then 
he adds, with rare discrimination and 
common-sense : " A distinction must be 
made between the moment when the great 
thought first breaks upon the mind, 

1 Leaving in the brain 
A rocking and a ringing/ 

and the hour of patient, elaborate execu- 
tion. It is in the conception only that the 
poet is vates: in the labor of putting that 
conception into words, he is simply the 
artist." 

* See his " Theory of Poetry," published in 
The Atlantic Monthly (September, 1905) as this 
book goes to press. 



Henry Timrod 61 

His own work gives fine illustration to 
this union between passion and patience, 
for he was both seer and artist. As a 
characteristic specimen of his style, we 
may take these verses addressed to a 
cotton boll : 

While I recline 

At ease beneath 

This immemorial pine, 

Small sphere! 

(By dusky fingers brought this morning here 

And shown with boastful smiles), 

I turn thy cloven sheath, 

Through which the soft white fibres peer, 

That, with their gossamer bands, 

Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands, 

And slowly, thread by thread, 

Draw forth the folded strands, 

Than which the trembling line, 

By whose frail help yon startled spider fled 

Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed 

Is scarce more fine ; 

And as the tangled skein 

Unravels in my hands, 

Betwixt me and the noonday light, 



62 The Holy Grail 

A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles 

The landscape broadens on my sight, 

As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell 

Like that which, in the ocean shell, 

With mystic sound, 

Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round, 

And turns some city lane 

Into the restless main, 

With all his capes and isles ! 

An elaborate metrical exposition of 
Timrod's theories of art is found in his 
" Vision of Poesy," the longest one of the 
first collection of his poems, published by 
Ticknor & Fields in i860. These pro- 
ductions won deserved praise, the critic of 
the New York Tribune finding in them 
" a genuine poetic instinct," with a 
" lively, delicate fancy, and a graceful 
beauty of expression." 

Timrod, more than any other man, is 
the poet of the South — of " the generous 
and lonely South." His voice is her 
breath, her spirit gave him life, and in her 



Henry Timrod 63 

defeat he fell. For when the flash of the 
Charleston cannon set the South on fire, 
Timrod was destined, like Sidney Lanier, 
to be one of the eventual victims of that 
fearful holocaust. From the first he 
threw himself with all his fervid feeling 
into the heated struggle. War verses, 
sonorous with drum-beat and trumpet, 
rolled from his pen, — yet beneath the blare 
and thunder breathes always some sweet 
earnest prayer for peace. His was a gen- 
tle spirit. In '62 he went to the front as 
correspondent for the Charleston Mer- 
cury, but was actually made sick with the 
sight of strife, and so " staggered home- 
ward, half blinded, bewildered, with a 
dull red mist before his eyes, and a shud- 
dering horror at heart." Then, in the 
thick of the whelming storm, he found for 
one swift elusive hour the sweet shelter 
of a comfortable home. Married in Co- 
lumbia to his " Katie," heroine of one of 



64 The Holy Grail 

the sweetest of his songs, he also found in 
that city what seemed an escape from the 
hungry wolf that had always followed at 
his heels. Becoming editor and part 
owner of a well-to-do Columbia paper, 
and blessed soon with a beautiful child 
whom he idolized, his gentle spirit was 
thrilled with quiet happiness. How pure 
and beautiful must have been the crowned 
love of a man who could sing thus of 
wooing : — 

As thou talkest at the fireside, 

With the little children by— 
As thou prayest in the darkness, 

When thy God is nigh — 

With a speech as chaste and gentle, 

And such meaning as become 
Ear of child, or ear of angel, 

Speak, or be thou dumb. 

Woo her thus, and she shall give thee 
Of her heart the sinless whole, 



Henry Timrod 65 

All the girl within her bosom, 
And her woman's soul.* 

Alas ! his babe was not yet two months 
old when the war-torch burnt his home, 
destroying utterly all his little property; 
leaving him beggared, only to be presently 
bereaved by the death of his beautiful boy. 
The poet's life henceforth became a tragic 
wrestling with famine and disease, made 
infinitely pathetic by the unmurmuring 
sweetness with which he bore up to the 
struggle. " Little Jack Horner," he 
writes to Hayne, making sad sport of his 
misery — " Little Jack Horner, who sang 
for his supper, and got his plumcake, was 
a far more lucky minstrel than I am." 
Concerning this minstrelsy of his, which 
was unspeakably dear to him, hunger 
made him add : " I would consign every 
line of it to eternal oblivion for one hun- 

* " The Lily Confidante." 
5 



66 The Holy Grail 

dred dollars in hand!" Copying legal 
papers for " a month's supply of bread 
and bacon," he says : " On two occasions 
I wrote from ten o'clock one morning 
until sunrise of the next day." Yet this 
man, while suffering so cruelly from the 
effects of the war, could nevertheless in- 
terpret the message of that terrible spring 
of '65 in these brave and beautiful words : 
" She hangs once more in our blasted 
gardens the fragrant lamps of the jessa- 
mine ; in the streets, she kindles the maple 
like a beacon announcing peace ; and from 
amidst the charred and blackened ruins of 
once happy homes, she pours through the 
mouth of her favorite musician, the 
mocking-bird, a song of hope and joy. 
What is the lesson which she designs by 
these means to convey? It may be 
summed in a single sentence — forgetful- 
ness of the past, effort in the present, 
and trust for the future!" When most 



Henry Timrod 67 

men would have been grinding their 
hearts to wormwood, he can, say to his 
dear friend Hayne, " I am really learning, 
Paul, to trust in God." 

In the autumn of 1867, from a last de- 
lightful visit to this brother soul of his, 
the young poet returned to Columbia to 
die. Hemorrhages befell him in the 
streets. Forced at length to his bed, they 
told him that his time had come. His 
surprised answer was, " And is this to be 
the end of all? So soon! so soon! and I 
have achieved so little. Do you not think 
I could will to live?" — adding, with a 
smile, " I might make an effort, like Mrs. 
Dombey, you know." His prayers were 
unceasing. Frequently he would fold his 
arms and repeat the lines, 

Jesus, lover of my soul. 

Tortured with thirst, which he was 
physically unable to quench, he mur- 



68 The Holy Grail 

mured : " I shall soon drink of the river 
of eternal life." Of death he said, while 
dying, " It appears like two tides — two 
tides advancing and retreating, these 
powers of life and death! Now the 
power of death recedes; but wait, it will 
advance again triumphant." To one who 
whispered, " You will soon be at rest 
now," he answered: "Yes; but love is 
sweeter than rest." 

" In a dim and musky chamber," while 
the dawn was broadening on the lawn 
without, they whispered, " He is gone." 
Shortly before breathing his last, he said 
to his sister, " Do you remember that lit- 
tle poem of mine?" The verses whereof 
he spoke, written long ago, proved now 
to be his swan-song : * 

Somewhere on this earthly planet 
In the dust of flowers to be, 

* " A Common Thought." 



Henry Timrod 69 

In the dewdrop, in the sunshine, 
Sleeps a solemn day for me. 



In a dim and musky chamber, 
I am breathing life away; 

Some one draws a curtain softly, 
And I watch the broadening day. 

As it purples in the zenith, 
As it brightens on the lawn, 

There's a hush of death about me, 
And a whisper, " He is gone !" 



SIDNEY LANIER 



SIDNEY LANIER 

MINSTREL AND MAN 

Ten years ago I undertook to collect 
the various definitions set forth by mod- 
ern masters as to what the Ars Poetica 
really is. I soon paused, overwhelmed. 
There was Poe, with his pagan contention 
that it is merely " the rhythmical creation 
of beauty." At the other extreme, there 
was the transcendental Browning, who 
calls it " a presentment of the correspond- 
ence of the universe to the Deity, of the 
natural to the spiritual, and of the actual 
to the ideal." Between these two defini- 
tions lies that vast ancient battlefield 
where nominalist and realist, rationalist 
and mystic, Aristotelian and Platonist, 
wage their never-ceasing war. 

73 



74 The Holy Grail 

I shall go just far enough into this de- 
batable ground to say that I believe the 
simple essential elements of all great 
poetry to be three: beauty and wisdom 
and passion. Beauty is the child of the 
emotions ; wisdom, like Minerva, is of the 
mind; and passion — as I use the word — 
possesses the entire being. 

Poe proved that he believed in his own 
definition of poetry by practising what he 
preached. Whatever else may be thought 
of that weird genius, it must certainly be 
conceded that his verse was musical, that 
he was in truth a creator of rhythmical 
beauty. 

Listen : 



For the moon never beams without bringing me 
dreams 
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee ; 
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright 
eyes 
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 



Sidney Lanier 75 

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my 
bride, 
In the sepulchre there by the sea, 
In her tomb by the sounding sea. 

That is an example of the capacity of 
our English speech towards the produc- 
tion of actual music; a fine example of 
the " rhythmical creation of beauty." So 
much must be conceded to the poetry of 
Poe; that he is unsurpassed in the con- 
sistency of his work witn his own par- 
ticular theory. And I will venture to 
say that no other American poet so nearly 
approaches him in the power of produc- 
ing pure musical effects as the noble 
singer to whom we are listening now. Let 
him sing for you some stanzas of his own 
" Song of the Chattahoochee," and tell me 
whether I am not right : 

Out of the hills of Habersham, 
Down the valleys of Hall, 



76 The Holy Grail 

I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
Split at the rock and together again, 
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
And flee from folly on every side 
With a lover's pain to attain the plain 
Far from the hills of Habersham, 
Far from the valleys of Hall. 



High o'er the hills of Habersham, 

Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
The hickory told me manifold 
Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, 
Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold 

Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 

These glades in the valleys of Hall. 



But oh, not the hills of Habersham, 

And oh, not the valleys of Hall 
Avail : I am fain for to water the plain. 
Downward the voices of Duty call — 
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 



Sidney Lanier 77 

The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
And the lordly main from beyond the plain 

Calls o'er the hills of Habersham, 

Calls through the valleys of Hall. 



Sidney Lanier has, indeed, been cen- 
sured for the large amount of attention he 
gave to the subject of the scientific con- 
struction of melodious verse. Mr. Sted- 
man, who is perhaps our ablest living lit- 
erary critic here in America, says that he 
had a theory which " led him to essay in 
language feats that only the gamut can 
render possible." I suppose that certain 
of his verses would seem to lend color to 
this criticism, which I have no intention of 
endeavoring to refute. Lanier is very well 
able to take care of his own theories, 
as is shown by his masterly essays on 
" Music and Poetry" and " The Science 
of English Verse." No view of him can 
be intelligently complete which does not 



78 The Holy Grail 

take cognizance of the fact that music and 
poetry were so bound together in his na- 
ture as to form the wedded whole of his 
inner spirit in an unbroken and indivisi- 
ble unison ; music, in the phrase of Rich- 
ard Wagner, being the mate of her liege 
lord, poetry. So we find his most inti- 
mate biographers declaring of Lanier that 
from his youth he was equally dominated 
by these two splendid geniuses, music 
and poetry, which were really one to him ; 
although we hear him actually exalting 
the wife above her husband in that naive 
letter to his friend Paul llayne : 

" Are you, by the way, a musician ? 
Strange that I have never before asked 
this question — when so much of my own 
life consists of music. I don't know that 
I've ever told you that whatever turn I 
have for art is purely musical; poetry 
being, with me, a mere tangent into which 
I shoot sometimes." 



Sidney Lanier 79 

I cannot forbear to quote here the elo- 
quent language of Asger Hamerik, for six 
years his director in the Peabody Sym- 
phony Orchestra of Baltimore: 

" To him as a child in his cradle music 
was given; the heavenly gift to feel and 
to express himself in tones. His human 
nature was like an enchanted instrument, 
a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo, need- 
ing but a breath or a touch to send its 
beauty out into the world. It was indeed 
irresistible that he should turn with those 
poetical feelings which transcend lan- 
guage to the penetrating gentleness of the 
flute, or the infinite passion of the violin ; 
for there was an agreement, a spiritual 
correspondence, between his nature and 
theirs, so that they mutually absorbed 
and expressed each other. In his hands 
the flute no longer remained a mere ma- 
terial instrument, but was transformed 
into a voice that set heavenly harmonies 



80 The Holy Grail 

into vibration. Its tones developed colors, 
warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeak- 
able poetry ; they were not only true and 
pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, sug- 
gestive of the depths and heights of being 
and of the delights which the earthly ear 
never hears and the earthly eye never sees. 
No doubt his firm faith in these lofty 
idealities gave him the power to present 
them to our imagination, and thus by the 
aid of the higher language of music to 
inspire others with that sense of beauty in 
which he constantly dwelt. . . . 

" I will never forget the impression he 
made on me when he played the flute- 
concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody 
symphony concert in 1878; his tall, hand- 
some, manly presence, his flute breathing 
noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra 
softly responding. The audience was 
spellbound. Such distinction, such refine- 
ment! He stood, the master, the genius." 



Sidney Lanier 81 

How could it be otherwise than that 
this passionate lover of music, who in his 
boyhood, after improvising on the violin, 
" would be rapt into an ecstasy which left 
his whole frame trembling with the ex- 
haustion of too tense delight;" who as 
a man both won his bread and found his 
pleasure with his flute — how could it be 
otherwise than that his noble poetry 
should inevitably rock and swing to the 
measure of melodious beauty ? I dare re- 
peat that for pure artistic beauty of form 
no American poet can surpass Lanier ex- 
cept it be the brilliant but erratic Poe. 

" Brilliant but erratic" — alas ! how true 

the terms ! Beauty is an essential of true 

poetry, but it is not the only essential. 

John Burroughs has been the last to say 

what others have discerned of Poe, that 

in his work " one's sense of artistic forms 

and verbal melody are alone appealed to." 

And Lanier himself, who was a trenchant 
6 



82 The Holy Grail 

critic, cuts to the heart of the matter 
when he says : " The trouble with Poe 
was he did not know enough. He needed 
to know a good many more things in 
order to be a great poet." 

Which brings me to say, as I promised, 
that the second essential element of great 
poetry is wisdom. 

I know that the word is used in two 
kinds ; and in both kinds do I use it now, 
as denoting not only mental acquisition, 
but also that higher power, largely moral, 
which is the veritable wisdom of the clear- 
eyed prophet. The great poet must have, 
in the first place, a large store of sound 
and scientific knowledge. " For all 
knowledge is food, as faith is wine, to a 
genius like Lanier." The age of poetry 
is never past ; there is nothing in culture 
or science hostile to it. No one can 
read Shakespeare without overwhelming 
amazement for his sheer learning. That 



Sidney Lanier 83 

lies really at the base of the Baconian 
craze, as Brandes has thoroughly shown. 
Unimaginative men who found it incredi- 
ble that a mere poacher and playwright — 
as they felicitously call him — should be a 
veritable encyclopaedia of scientific infor- 
mation, have had perforce to find an alias 
for Shakespeare, and the only contempo- 
rary who suited their necessities was Fran- 
cis Bacon. Hence that lumbersome lo- 
gomachy of Ignatius Donnelly and his 
compeers. But this same amazing fulness 
of learning characterizes in less degree, I 
claim, all of the major poets. How we 
marvel that John Keats, a mere apothe- 
cary's clerk, as the Baconians would say, 
should be saturated to his finger-tips 
with the spirit of classic mythology, and 
drenched from head to heel in the inner- 
most secrets of nature. As for Milton, he 
was the most learned man of his time. 
Browning must be read with an encyclo- 



84 The Holy Grail 

psedia for more reasons than to solve his 
obscurities. And surely readers of Ten- 
nyson do not need to be reminded of such 
touches as meet us, for example, in a 
phrase like that descriptive of the yew 
tree answering a random stroke 

. . . with fruitful cloud and living smoke ; 

or of such illustrative touches as when the 
poet asks : 

Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, 

Delaying as the tender ash delays 

To clothe herself when all the woods are green? 

So also of Lanier it has been truly said 
that he was a close scientific observer, 
and " a tremendous student, not of music 
alone, but of language, of philosophy, and 
of science. He loved science. He was an 
inventor. . . . But that only made his 
range of poetic thought wider as his out- 
look became larger. The world is open- 
ing to the poet with every question the 



Sidney Lanier 85 

crucible asks of the elements, with every 
spectrum the prism steals from a star. 
The old he has and all the new." 

I do not care to dwell longer on this 
phase of our subject. Perhaps a dainty 
little sonnet of which I am very fond may 
serve to denote somehow that taste and 
gift for knowledge which characterizes 
all of Lanier's verse. It will the better 
appeal to Southern ears because it is in- 
dited to " The Mocking Bird:" 

Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray 

That o'er the general leafage boldly grew, 

He summ'd the woods in song ; or typic drew 

The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay 

Of languid doves when long their lovers stray, 

And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew 

At morn in brake or bosky avenue. 

Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could 

say. 
Then down he shot, bounced airily along 
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song 
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. 
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain: 



86 The Holy Grail 

How may the death of that dull insect be 
The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree? 

I wonder whether that last bold stroke 
of Lanier's inspired another Southern 
poet, Henry Jerome Stockard, to carry 
out the Shakespeare thought in an exqui- 
site quatrain " To a Mocking Bird :" 

The name thou wearest does thee grievous 
wrong ; 

No mimic thou; that voice is thine alone. 
The poets sing but strains of Shakespeare's song ; 

The birds, but notes of thine imperial own. 

And now let me hasten to say that Sid- 
ney Lanier had a far larger wisdom than 
the wisdom of mere knowledge. He was 
a clear-eyed seer of the truth. It was in 
his nature to touch the soul of things, and 
then touch hearts. Carlyle was right; a 
poet's truest mission, like that of the mu- 
sician, is to lead us to the edge of the In- 
finite, and let us for moments gaze into 
that. Herein is wisdom : to penetrate into 



Sidney Lanier 87 

the inmost heart of a thing, to detect the 
innermost mystery of it, and then reveal 
it to the world in " thoughts that breathe 
and words that burn." That is to be a 
poet-prophet; and a poet-prophet was 
Lanier. 

I seldom cross Charleston Bay when 
the green is on the marshes but I think of 
Sidney Lanier and his noble sunset hymn 
to " The Marshes of Glynn" down in 
Georgia : 

. . . how ample, the marsh and the sea and the 
sky! 

A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist- 
high, broad in the blade, 

Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a 
light or a shade, 

Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain, 

To the terminal blue of the main. 

Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal 
sea? 
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free 



88 The Holy Grail 

From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion 

of sin, 
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of 

the marshes of Glynn. 

# * * 

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery 

sod, 
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness 

of God: 
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh - 

hen flies 
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt 

the marsh and the skies : 
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in 

the sod 
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of 

God: 
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness 

within 
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of 

Glynn. 

* * * 

And now from the Vast of the Lord will the 

waters of sleep 
Roll in on the souls of men, 
But who will reveal to our waking ken 



Sidney Lanier 89 

The forms that swim and the shapes that creep 

Under the waters of sleep? 
And I would I could know what swimmeth below 

when the tide comes in 
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous 

marshes of Glynn. 

A deep sort of wisdom is this, which 
can win truth from the treacherous 
marsh, and make of the humble marsh- 
hen a messenger of God. Small wonder 
that a brother poet salutes the spirit of 
Lanier with the rapturous cry : 

The marsh burst into bloom for thee — 
And still abloom shall ever be ! 
Its sluggish tide shall henceforth bear alway 
A charm it did not hold until thy day* 

Beauty he had and wisdom he had, and 
finally he had passion — that splendid thrill 
of quivering life that breathes through 
words until they glow like coals that once 
were dead. A man can be a poet without 

* Waitman Barbe. 



90 The Holy Grail 

passion — there was Pope; and his verses 
may pass into proverbs, but they will 
hardly take hold on hearts. Some one 
quizzed me the other day because I had 
likened Lanier to Keats. Very well. But 
what I mean to say again is that amid 
our glorious company of English poets 
I see two splendid quivering creatures, 
who, in complete attune, stand together 
tingling and aglow with life, life, life. 
They are slender, tense, delicate, if you 
will ; but it is the tenseness and the slen- 
derness and the delicacy of the quivering 
thoroughbred. They are such figures as 
I imagine Apollo to have been. And per- 
haps it may not show any very great rug- 
gedness of taste, but I make the personal 
confession that while I go to Tennyson 
for noble music and to Browning for the 
stuff of which character is builded, and to 
Shakespeare for occasional glimpses of 
the Infinite ; yet when I am tired, and the 



Sidney Lanier 91 

tide of life runs low, there stand upon my 
shelves two slender volumes, Lanier and 
Keats, which seem to me like slender 
streams of refreshment from the inner- 
most passionate heart of life. Even when 
the blood is most sluggish it cannot refuse 
the stir of that awful " Revenge of Ha- 
mish." If there is a more vibrant, domi- 
nant poem of passion in all American lit- 
erature I would like to know where to 
find it. You know the story. The poem 
is too long for me to quote in full. Mac- 
lean had gone a-hunting for deer, all am- 
bitious to slay in the sight of his wife and 
his child. His henchman, Hamish, had 
been roused breakfastless from bed to set 
the quarry towards the stand where the 
grim master, with his wife and child, 
was waiting. But the fleet deer escaped 
the hungry henchman. And Maclean, all 
red with wrath, had his men strip Hamish 
to the waist and ply him with thongs — 



92 The Holy Grail 

and " reckon no stroke if the blood follow 
not at the bite of the thong!" 

So Hamish made bare, and took him his strokes ; 
at the last he smiled. 

We can imagine the bitterness of that 
smile. For, left now alone with the wife 
and child, while the men go back to the 
hunt, suddenly " he snatches the child 
from the mother, and clambers the crag 
towards the sea." The mother screams 
shrill and pursues him. Maclean and his 
clansmen hear, and strive and strain to 
outrun him. 

But, mother, 'tis vain; but, father, 'tis vain; 
Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and 
dangles the child o'er the deep. 

Now a faintness falls on the men that run, and 
they all stand still. 
And the wife prays Hamish as if he were God, 
on her knees, 



Sidney Lanier 93 

Crying : " Hamish ! O Hamish ! but please, 
but please 
For to spare him !" and Hamish still dangles the 
child, with a wavering will. 

On a sudden he turns ; with a sea-hawk scream, 
and a gibe, and a song, 
Cries : " So ; I will spare ye the child if, in 

sight of ye all, 
Ten blows on Maclean's bare back shall fall, 
And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not 
at the bite of the thong !" 

Then Maclean he set hardly his tooth to his lip 
that his tooth was red, 
Breathed short for a space, said: "Nay, but 

it never shall be! 
Let me hurl off the damnable hound in the 
sea!" 
But the wife : " Can Hamish go fish us the child 
from the sea, if dead? 

Say yea ! Let them lash me, Hamish?"—" Nay !" 
— " Husband, the lashing will heal ; 

But, oh, who will heal me the bonny sweet 
bairn in his grave? 

Could ye cure me my heart with the death of 
a knave? 



94 The Holy Grail 

Quick! Love! I will bare thee — so — kneel!" 

Then Maclean 'gan slowly to kneel 
With never a word, till presently downward he 

jerked to the earth. 
Then the henchman — he that smote Hamish — 

would tremble and lag; 
" Strike, hard !" quoth Hamish, full stern, from 

the crag; 
Then he struck him, and " One !" sang Hamish, 

and danced with the child in his mirth. 

And no man spake beside Hamish; he counted 
each stroke with a song, 
When the last stroke fell, then he moved him 

a pace down the height, 
And he held forth the child in the heartaching 
sight 
Of the mother, and looked all pitiful grave, as 
repenting a wrong. 

And there as the motherly arms stretched out 
with the thanksgiving prayer — 
And there as the mother crept up with a fear- 
ful swift pace, 
Till her finger nigh felt of the bairnie's face — 
In a flash, fierce Hamish turned round and lifted 
the child in the air. 



Sidney Lanier 95 

And sprang with the child in his arms from the 
horrible height in the sea, 
Shrill screeching, " Revenge !" in the wind- 
rush ; and pallid Maclean, 
Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain, 
Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked 
hold of dead roots of a tree — 

And gazed hungrily o'er, and the blood from his 
back drip-dripped in the brine, 
And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as 

he flew, 
And the mother stared white on the waste of 
blue, 
And the wind drove a cloud to seaward, and the 
sun began to shine. 

That is passion in its crudest and most 
biting tincture. It serves as a crude im- 
pressive instance of the tingling and 
throbbing vitality that transforms all of 
Lanier's poetry, no matter what his 
theme. What his distinctive passion was 
will, I think, now presently appear. For 
I intend now to speak of Lanier the man. 



96 The Holy Grail 

His life was gentle ; and the elements 

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, this was a man! 

It is to the everlasting glory of the 
South that this man was a Southerner. 
To me he seems typical of the highest and 
finest that can come out of " the generous 
and lonely South" that we love so well. 
He was born in Macon on the 3d of Feb- 
ruary, 1842, of a good old Huguenot 
stock. From childhood he showed pas- 
sionate attachment to music; but he had 
a deeper passion than music. Before he 
was eighteen years old he recorded in his 
college note-book the index to this con- 
trolling passion of his life : 

" The point which I wish to settle is 
merely, by what method shall I ascertain 
what I am fit for, as preliminary to ascer- 
taining God's will with reference to me. 
... I am more than all perplexed by this 
fact, that the prime inclination, that is, 



Sidney Lanier 97 

natural bent (which I have checked, 
though) of my nature is to music; and 
for that I have the greatest talent . . . 
But I cannot bring myself to believe that 
I was intended for a musician, because it 
seems so small a business in comparison 
with other things which, it seems to me, 
I might do. Question here, What is the 
province of music in the economy of the 
world?" 

From such insistent questionings he 
was suddenly summoned by the shrill 
bugle of war. For he was no less a sol- 
dier than a dreamer; in him the qualities 
of tenderness and strength were most 
harmoniously blended. As a child he had 
won distinction for the soldierly fashion 
in which he drilled a body of schoolboys 
in the tactics of the militia, so that the 
juvenile battalion was actually accorded a 
place in the State parades of their elders. 
Therefore his ear was quick to catch the 
7 



98 The Holy Grail 

very first notes of the bugle, and he en- 
listed in April, 1861, in the First Regi- 
ment of Georgia Volunteers. During the 
course of his four years' faithful service 
he three times refused promotion, because 
he would have been separated from his 
younger brother, whom he dearly loved. 
Towards the close of the war he was cap- 
tured while in charge of a vessel attempt- 
ing to run the blockade; and the five 
months of confinement in the prison at 
Point Lookout sealed him for the grave. 
True, for fifteen long years thereafter he 
battled bravely against his terrible dis- 
ease; but from this fatal period of his im- 
prisonment the issue was never once in 
doubt. Thus, having sacrificed his health 
and strength upon his country's altar, 
when the terrible war at length was over, 
he took up his own sad desperate warfare, 
which he waged with the unfaltering 
courage of a Saladin until at last, in 1881, 



Sidney Lanier 99 

he was compelled to show the final flag of 
truce, yielding up " the white flower of a 
blameless life" into the hands of that grim 
warrior who always conquers in the end. 
From the time of his settlement in Balti- 
more in 1874 his was " a story of as brave 
and sad a struggle as the history of genius 
records. On the one hand was the oppor- 
tunity for study, and the full conscious- 
ness of power, and a will never subdued ; 
and on the other a body wasting with 
consumption, that must be forced to task 
beyond its strength not merely to express 
the thoughts of beauty which strove for 
utterance, but from the necessity of pro- 
viding bread for his babes." Yet he could 
even dare to jest about it — about the 
awful doom which he foresaw steadily 
from the first, but which he never allowed 
to unnerve him. He could dare to write 
pleasantries concerning " a certain Miss 



100 The Holy Grail 

Death," " her coquetries," and her " fan 
of a raven's wing." 

His life in Baltimore, despite this piti- 
ful struggle, was very sweet to Lanier. 
Here his musical soul could revel for the 
first time amid the opulent creations of 
the masters. " His attitude in listening. 
was usually a bent, reverent posture, with 
folded arms and closed eyes — a study of 
profound meditation and absorption." 
Yet music was with him still, as it had 
been in his youth, but a means to a higher 
end. Listen to this sonnet to Beethoven : 

Sovereign Master ! stern and splendid power, 

That calmly dost both time and death defy; 
Lofty and lone as mountain peaks that tower, 

Leading our thoughts up to the eternal sky; 
Keeper of some divine, mysterious key, 

Raising us far above all human care, 
Unlocking awful gates of harmony 

To let Heaven's light in on the world's de- 
spair ; 



Sidney Lanier 101 

Smiter of solemn chords that still command 
Echoes in souls that suffer and aspire ! 

In the great moment while we hold thy hand, 
Baptized with pain and rapture, tears and fire, 

God lifts our saddened foreheads from the dust — 
The everlasting God in whom we trust. 

It was during this Baltimore period 
that his noblest friendships ripened — save 
only that his devoted wife was always his 
closest friend. Those who would under- 
stand his passion for friendship and gain 
also an insight into the noble character- 
istics of such of his friends as Bayard 
Taylor and Paul H. Hayne will be fairly 
charmed by the carefully edited collection 
of " The Letters of Sidney Lanier." And 
yet, while friendship was with him a pas- 
sion, it was only an outer aspect of some- 
thing deeper and more beauteous still. 

With Sidney Lanier, as we have seen, 
beauty itself was a passion; but beauty 
was not his elemental and controlling pas- 
sion. It derived its chief charm from the 



102 The Holy Grail 

fact that it was to him a synonym for 
something more beautiful than beauty. 
Wisdom was with him a passion, but not 
as an end in itself, rather only as a means 
toward the quest of his Holy Grail. The 
consuming passion of his life, from the 
heyday of youth's " high emprise" to 
that frosty autumn morning when his un- 
faltering will rendered " its supreme sub- 
mission to the adored will of God" — was 
his passion for holiness, burning within 
him in a flame of the whitest lambent heat 
and enwrapping him with a saintly au- 
reole of 

And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
. . . high thought, and amiable words 

It may be said of him, as Liszt said of 
Chopin, that " his character in none of its 
numerous folds concealed a single move- 
ment, a single pulse, which was not dic- 
tated by the nicest sense of honor, the 



Sidney Lanier 103 

most delicate appreciation of affection." 
He seems to me to have been a far holier 
man than Chopin, to whom he has at 
times been likened. Over and over again 
he was fond of uttering as the key-note 
of his creed of life, whether aesthetic or 
ethical, " Beauty is holiness, and holiness 
is beauty;" somewhat as Keats had said: 

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know ! 

But with Lanier holiness was an in- 
tensely practical thing, the key to his ca- 
reer and to his character, the one domi- 
nant passion of his life. It is perhaps the 
key even to his apparent defects, which, 
when they are examined closely, prove to 
be virtues. If, for example, Lanier's po- 
etry had a " limited range," as I have 
heard good people declare, it is because 
he had learned to say : 

I dare do all that may become a man ; 
Who dares do more is none. 



104 The Holy Grail 

Listen to these words from his closing 
chapter on " The English Novel" — words 
to which our living novelists might well 
give heed: 

" Wherever there is contest as between 
artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral 
side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor 
hew us out the most ravishing combina- 
tion of tender curves and spheric softness 
that ever stood for woman ; yet if the lip 
have a certain fulness that hints of the 
flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the 
minutest particular the physical beauty 
suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor — 
unless he be portraying a moral ugliness 
for a moral purpose — may as well give 
over his marble for paving-stones. Time, 
whose judgments are inexorably moral, 
will not accept his work. For indeed we 
may say that he who has not yet per- 
ceived how artistic beauty and moral 
beauty are convergent lines which run 



Sidney Lanier 105 

back into a common ideal origin and who, 
therefore, is not afire with moral beauty, 
just as with artistic beauty — that he, in 
short, who has not come to that stage of 
quiet and eternal frenzy in which the 
beauty of holiness and the holiness of 
beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, 
shine as one light, within him — he is not 
yet the great artist." 

He did not believe, with Flaubert, in 
" art for art's sake." He believed, with 
Ruskin, that " the arts can never be right 
themselves unless their motive is right." 
So, while the crude native strength of 
Whitman, for example, " refreshed him 
like harsh salt spray," yet Whitman's 
lawlessness so repelled him that he called 
him " poetry's butcher." 

— "As near as I can make it out, Whit- 
man's argument seems to be that, because 
a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is 



106 The Holy Grail 

admirable, and because the Mississippi is 
long, therefore every American is God." 

With Sidney Lanier, let us repeat 
again, as he so often loved to do, beauty 
was holiness and holiness was beauty. It 
is his chief distinction among English 
poets that, while you cannot call him 
specifically a religious poet, he, more 
passionately than any of his illustrious 
peers, loves to dwell exclusively upon the 
things that are pure and lovely and of 
good report. His beauty is the beauty of 
holiness and his wisdom has for its end 
the finding of the Infinite wisdom. He is 
a true knight of the Grail. 

I have said that he cannot be called 
specifically a religious poet. He wrote 
only two poems that are distinctively of 
this character, and both of them are no- 
table also for other qualities in an almost 
equal measure. The longer of the two, 
called " The Crystal," is the most remark- 



Sidney Lanier 107 

able piece of condensed epigrammatic 
criticism that English literature affords. 
The other of these two poems is very 
brief, but it is wondrously beautiful, even 
as it is wondrously sad. He calls it " A 
Ballad of Trees and the Master." 



Into the woods my Master went, 

Clean forspent, forspent. 

Into the woods my Master came, 

Forspent with love and shame. 

But the olives, they were not blind to Him, 

The little gray leaves were kind to Him; 

The thorn-tree had a mind to Him 

When into the woods He came. 



Out of the woods my Master went, 

And He was well content. 

Out of the woods my Master came, 

Content with death and shame. 

When Death and Shame would woo Him last, 

From under the trees they drew Him last; 

'Twas on a tree they slew Him — last 

When out of the woods He came. 



108 The Holy Grail 

The enthusiastic editor whose rare 
good fortune it was to " discover" this 
poem, has truthfully said: 

" These two short verses are exquisite 
beyond description. They are deep and 
rich as the love of God ; they are tender 
as the hushed harps of the angels that 
watched over Gethsemane, but forbore to 
help. The lines vary from five syllables to 
ten, with an irregularity which is masterly 
perfection. I should not have believed 
it possible to put into a poem, which can- 
not be surpassed for tenderness and so- 
lemnity, those extraordinary three-syllable 
rhymes, ' blind to Him/ ' kind to Him,' 
' mind to Him' and ' woo Him last,' 
' drew Him last,' ' slew Him last ;' for 
such rhymes were usually supposed to be- 
long to burlesque, but here they jar no 
sensitive nerve. They seem to draw out 
and prolong the sweet pain of the thought 
like the 'hold' which tells the singer to 



Sidney Lanier 109 

linger on a tender note. The reader will 
not wonder that I repeated them over 
hundreds of times. Never since but once 
have I been so touched by a short poem, 
and that was another red-letter day when 
I first read Tennyson's ' Crossing the 
Bar.' " 

I find myself embarrassed by the abun- 
dant richness of my material. I should 
especially like to show you, from the 
noble poem called " Clover," how bravely 
this gentle suffering poet submitted to 
the great browsing " Course-of-Things," 
actually with pseans of humble thanksgiv- 
ing for the privilege of self-sacrifice! I 
should also like to enjoy with you his 
brave parable of the "Corn;" or his 
splendid " Sunrise" hymn of the live-oaks 
and the marshes, whereof the critic al- 
ready quoted has declared that " no other 
American poet has reached the height of 
this one work, that no poem of its length 



110 The Holy Grail 

by Bryant or Poe or Longfellow or 
Lowell can compare with it for creative 
poetic fervor or absolute mastery of the 
secrets of poetic structure." * But I am 
admonished that this address must have 
an end, and, therefore, I choose, since 
choose I must, one final simple song, for 
the reason that it voices so perfectly the 
aim of Sidney Lanier's existence. He 
calls it, significantly, " Life and Song:" 

If life were caught by a clarionet, 
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed, 

Should thrill its joy and trill its fret, 
And utter its heart in every deed, 

Then would this breathing clarionet 
Type what the poet fain would be; 

For none o' the singers ever yet 
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, 

Or clearly sung his true, true thought, 
Or utterly bodied forth his life, 

* William Hayes Ward. 



Sidney Lanier 111 

Or out of life and song has wrought 
The perfect one of man and wife; 

Or lived and sung, that Life and Song 
Might each express the other's all, 

Careless if life or art were long 
Since both were one, to stand or fall ; 

So that the wonder struck the crowd, 
Who shouted it about the land : 

His song was only living aloud, 
His work, a singing with his hand! 

I do not know that the wonder of Sid- 
ney Lanier's musical life has as yet 
" struck the crowd," or will ever do so, 
for crowds are hardly susceptible to any 
such music as that. But it seems to me 
that this modest knight of God, a-sighing 
for what seemed to him to be the unat- 
tainable, had in reality already attained 
and is in reality already made perfect, in 
that we who have caught even a few faint 
sweet echoes from his passionate, throb- 
bing flute are more than ready to say for 



112 The Holy Grail 

him with absolute certitude that tribute 
for which he hungered and which would 
be any poet's most glorious epitaph : 

He wholly lived his minstrelsy; 
His song was only living aloud, 
His work, a singing with his hand. 



THE CRUSADERS 



THE CRUSADERS 



A STUDY OF THE TRANSFORMED CROSS 

With the twelfth century, while the 
dawn from the Dark Ages was as yet un- 
broken, appeared that romantic and spir- 
ited movement of history known as the 
Crusades. Europe had been sleeping; 
not the sleep of sweet rest and pleasant 
dreams, but the distressed horrid slum- 
ber of nightmare. During the ninth and 
tenth centuries there had been no less 
than fifty incursions of the Northmen 
throughout France, which they swept as 
with a besom of destruction; while 
countless whirlwinds of the Huns devas- 
tated the whole of Europe, until the fields 
were actually left untilled, becoming, as 
in primeval times, the dwelling-place of 

115 



116 The Holy Grail 

numberless wild beasts, which herded in 
human homesteads, unafraid, and, in 
turn, less dreaded than these human 
beasts of Huns. They were wandering 
shepherd tribes, natives of the north of 
Asia, and inhabiting the vast plains be- 
tween Russia and China. " They had no 
houses. They lived in tents, in which 
they also stabled their horses. From 
being constantly on horseback their legs 
were crooked. They were short men, 
broad-shouldered, with strong muscular 
arms; had coarse, thick lips, straight, 
black, wiry hair, little, round, sloe-like 
eyes, yellow complexions, and sausage 
noses. They were filthy in their habits. 
Their horrible ugliness, their disgusting 
smell, their ferocity, the speed with which 
they moved, their insensibility to the gen- 
tler feelings, made the Goths, with whom 
they first came in contact, believe they 
were half demons. They ate, drank, and 



The Crusaders 117 

slept on horseback. Their no less hideous 
wives and children followed diem in wag- 
ons. They ate roots and raw meat. They 
seemed insensible to hunger, thirst, and 
cold." To complete the repulsiveness of 
this interesting picture from the pages of 
Baring-Gould, we need only to add that 
the weapons with which these frightful 
folk fought were the sword, the spear, the 
battle-axe, and, chiefly, the terrible Tar- 
tar bows. They seemed created and 
equipped of the arch-fiend himself. 

With the coming of barbarians into 
the land, there was a revival of barbarism 
among the people. " One feels almost, 
in reading the foul and frightful annals, 
as if the ancient Pagan temper, driven 
into the air or trodden into the soil before 
the armies of the empire, had settled back 
densely and heavily upon Europe, and 
was infecting and poisoning the very 



118 The Holy Grail 

springs of spiritual life." * This was true, 
not only of the people, but also of their 
princes, and even of the popes. It is no 
figure of speech to say that the " vicars 
of Christ" became the devotees of Satan. 
Not only were satanic rites actually prac- 
tised at the Vatican, but the spirit of evil 
reigned there, the pontifical palace at one 
time becoming little else than " a vast 
school of prostitution." These are not 
the slander of Protestantism. Why, in- 
deed, should not we feel as deeply as the 
Roman Catholics the shame of those 
awful days, seeing that the Church of 
Rome is in a sense the mother of us all? 
The French Catholic, Mabillon, out of 
many that might be cited, confesses that 
most of the popes of the tenth century 
" lived rather like monsters, or like wild 
beasts, than like bishops." Let us hear 

* Storrs, " Bernard of Clairvaux." 



The Crusaders 119 

also from Cardinal Newman on this sub- 
ject. In his " Essays, Critical and His- 
torical" he declares that " no exaggera- 
tion is possible of the demoralized state 
into which the Christian world, and espe- 
cially the Church of Rome, had fallen in 
the years that followed the extinction of 
the Carlovingian line (a.d. 887). . . . 
At the close of the ninth century Hope 
Stephen VI. dragged the body of an ob- 
noxious predecessor from the grave, and, 
after subjecting it to a mock trial, cut off 
its head and threw it into the Tiber. He 
himself was subsequently deposed, and 
strangled in prison. In the years that fol- 
lowed, the power of electing to the pope- 
dom actually fell into the hands of 
intriguing and licentious Theodora and 
her equally unprincipled daughters. . . . 
Boniface VII. (a.d. 974), in the space of 
a few weeks after his elevation, plundered 
the treasury and basilica of St. Peter 



120 The Holy Grail 

of all he could conveniently carry off 
and fled to Constantinople. . . . Benedict 
IX. (a.d. 1033) was consecrated pope, 
according to some authorities, at the age 
of ten or twelve years, and became no- 
torious for adulteries and murders. At 
length he resolved on marrying his first 
cousin ; and when her father would not 
consent except on the condition of his re- 
signing the popedom, he sold it for a 
large sum, and consecrated the purchaser 
as his successor. Such are a few of the 
most prominent features of the ecclesias- 
tical history of those dreadful times, 
when in the words of St. Bruno, ' the 
world lay in wickedness, holiness had dis- 
appeared, justice had perished, and truth 
had been buried.' " It was a Pagan revi- 
val of indefinitely greater strength and 
evil than that of Julian the Apostate ; for 
then paganism had been without the 
Church, but now the Church itself was 



The Crusaders 121 

paganized. Tiberius and Caligula, those 
monsters of heathendom, were now out- 
done by the " holy fathers" of Christen- 
dom, who vied with one another in the 
practice of the vilest vices, the rule of the 
Christian Church being actually called, 
and truthfully called, a " pornocracy." 

The distress of the people was most 
profound. As though the natural terrors 
were not sufficiently acute, they fell into 
abnormal fear of the supernatural. It 
was believed that the end of the world 
was nigh. Fearful portents were seen in 
sky and sea. Every night men laid weary 
heads upon their pillows, in dread expec- 
tation of the midnight trump of doom. 
Each morning the sun blanched their 
faces with the promise of a burning 
world. Nerveless, they forsook accus- 
tomed tasks, awaiting in idle cowardice 
the final hour. Famine fell upon the land. 
Greece, Italy, France, and England were 



122 The Holy Grail 

involved in it. The people actually fell 
into the horrors of cannibalism. " Men 
ate earth, weeds, roots, the bark of trees, 
vermin, dead bodies." Mothers devoured 
their children, and children their mothers, 
in the frenzy of hunger. Men were mur- 
dered to be eaten, and human flesh was 
almost openly sold in the markets. Storrs 
says : " The multitude of the dead was 
so great that they could not be buried, 
and wolves flocked to feast on their bod- 
ies. Great numbers were tumbled promis- 
cuously into vast trenches. A state of 
fierce cannibal savagery appeared likely 
to mark the end of a fallen and ruined 
race, for which the Lord had died in vain. 
It was not wonderful that men following 
their dead relations to the grave some- 
times cast themselves into it, to end at 
once their intolerable life." The Roman 
Catholic historian, Michelet, has dramat- 
ically pointed out that " the very statues 



The Crusaders 123 

of the period are sad and pinched, as if 
the dreadful apprehension of the age had 
sunk into the softened stone." It was the 
age of the power of darkness. The whole 
world lay in wickedness, and the Church 
of Christ was asleep. 

Then, in that darkest, stillest hour 
which is just before the dawn, a silver 
bugle rang clear and shrill, like the call 
of the chanticleer. It was God's breath 
that filled it; and it thrilled with the 
music of Christ's name. From sea to sea, 
from land to land it sounded. Men 
rubbed their eyes; leaped to their feet in 
the darkness ; buckled on their scabbards ; 
flashed blades high in the unresponsive 
air ; shouted to the chill gray dawn, " It 
is the will of God !" and rushed, six hun- 
dred thousand strong, towards the holy 
city of Jerusalem, " to break the heathen 
and uphold the Christ." Seven times the 
silver bugle sounded. Seven times it 



124 The Holy Grail 

roused new sleepers to the hurry of im- 
petuous warfare; seven times the sons 
of reawakening- Europe flung themselves 
across the seas against the sullen Sara- 
cens, who stood like a dark wall between 
them and the holy home of their Lord the 
Christ — only to be cast back on the sod- 
den shores, clotted with the blood of de- 
feat, or else pale corpses. Even children, 
a score of thousand children, mere tender 
babes, piped with their treble voices, " It 
is the will of God !" and sought to redeem, 
with swords in their dimpled hands, the 
home of the Babe of Bethlehem; but 
they, too — O pitiful ! — were lost, a myr- 
iad babes in the wood, their only shroud 
the leaves, their only priest the robin. 
What a catastrophe ! men will say, have 
said. The Crusades — what a failure, 
what a vast mistake of history! But in 
the end history does not makes mistakes. 



The Crusaders 125 

When we cannot understand her, it is 
only because we are not wise enough. 
For history is the handmaid of the Al- 
mighty, and " facts are the finger of 
God." The Crusades? Men of science 
tell us that to every sleeper, in every 
night, comes a moment fraught with the 
baleful threat of death. The tide of the 
blood is ebbing. The hammer of the pulse 
is almost silent. The great engine of the 
heart throbs its least and faintest. Then, 
they tell us, unless at that fearful time 
there come some stir of warning to the 
sleeper, some whispering call from the 
deeps of the darkness to startle the engine 
to its work again, and the pulse to its 
duty, and the blood to its flow — then the 
heart sleeps forever, and when friends 
come in the morning they find a dead man 
there. So we may say that the call to 
the Crusades saved the life of Europe. 
Their origin has been a mystery. His- 



126 The Holy Grail 

torians have stood amazed at this vast 
sudden movement of millions towards the 
same frail sentimental goal. But the call 
to the Crusades was the call of God. The 
sleepers stirred. Their pulses set a-beat- 
ing to the quick throb of war drums. 
The sluggish blood sprang once more like 
a brook. The Crusaders were defeated, 
but Europe was saved, because she was 
awake. The darkness was overpast. 
New life came, as always, out of the East 
into the West. From that moment the 
page of history brightens. The period of 
those strange holy wars, apparently so 
unsuccessful, is precisely the period of 
the dawn from the darkest age that has 
ever eclipsed the world since Christ was 
slain, into the requickened life of day. 
And so, in the wiser way, those wars were 
gloriously successful. God's thoughts are 
not as man's thoughts. " He moves in 
a mysterious way, His wonders to per- 



The Crusaders 127 

form." The call to the Crusades was a 
thoughtful loving device of the great 
watchful Father to save His sleeping chil- 
dren from the sleep of death, as He 
waked them with the music of Christ's 
name. 

Moreover, the Crusades did a service 
not for Europe only, but for the whole 
world ; not for that age alone, but for all 
time. Think what a flower grew up from 
the blood of those fallen knights ! It is the 
flower of chivalry. Shame on that cheap 
humor that would pawn our holiest tra- 
ditions for a laugh! Pity it is that all 
of us " Yankees" could not go and dwell 
for a season in King Arthur's court, 
there to learn at least a higher worship 
than the worship of the dollar. No sin- 
gle gift has come to us from Christianity, 
that great source of all best gifts, which 
is of sweeter influence in the mutual rela- 
tionships of men than the spirit of chiv- 



128 The Holy Grail 

airy. The knights, once sworn to a noble 
cause, were always malcontent with ig- 
nobility. Unsuccessful in attaining the 
material object of their welfare, they did 
but learn a firmer grasp on the snowy 
shields of the ideal. Failing to gain pos- 
session of the Holy Land, they yet were 
led, through pursuing a noble and roman- 
tic purpose, to know of a holier land, of 
that fair kingdom of God which is within. 
The inspiring history of that holy city, Je- 
rusalem, which they sought in vain to 
take and keep, told them of a greatness 
which is greater than that of taking a city. 
Schooled in the noble discipline of fight- 
ing, unafraid, whole hordes of over- 
whelming heathen, they were wed forever 
to the battle of the weak against the 
strong, and so returned from fighting the 
strong men of the East to fight for the 
weak of the West. The knight's banner, 
once uplifted, never falls: for it is the 



The Crusaders 129 

essence of knighthood to battle for ideals, 
and ideals are unaffected by material fail- 
ures. You cannot hurt a spirit. See, 
then, what rich bequest comes to the 
world from these fanatical Crusades. 
They taught the world the battle of the 
weak against the strong; the battle for 
the spiritual against the material and 
gross; the battle of ideals against dol- 
lars; the battle for women against vil- 
lains, of romanticism against realism, of 
poetry against the prosaic, of right 
against wrong. But for the Crusades, 
men perhaps would not know the manly 
gesture of baring the head to women — 
that remarkable tribute of physical 
strength to spiritual strength. But for 
the Crusades there might be now no clear- 
eyed lad to defend a child against a bully. 
But for the Crusades, our minstrelsy 
would be unspeakably impoverished ; for 
the story of the foolish doings of those 



130 The Holy Grail 

romantic knights has been the theme of 
all our wisest music since their time. 

Tennyson's glowing pages draw all 
their light from chivalry. The great 
Victorian poet has, indeed, uttered the 
very creed of knighthood for us, when, 
speaking as King Arthur to his knights, 
he cries : 

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear 

To reverence the King, as if he were 

Their conscience, and their conscience as their 

King, 
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, 
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 
To honour his own word as if his God's, 
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 
To love one maiden only, cleave to her, 
And worship her by years of noble deeds, 
Until they won her ; for indeed I knew 
Of no more subtle master under heaven 
Than is the maiden passion for a maid, 
Not only to keep down the base in man, 
But teach high thought, and amiable words 



The Crusaders 131 

And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 

What ear so dull as to be deaf to that 
noble music ? What heart so numb as not 
to thrill with the charm of knightliness ? 
Chivalry : it may be called the fairest 
flower of history, sprung from the root 
of that tree which Roman soldiers planted 
one day, high on Calvary. For as the 
source of knighthood is the Crusades, so 
the source of the Crusades is the cross. 

That is what the word means. A cru- 
sade is a war for the cross. The sign of 
enlistment was not a cap and a row of 
buttons, it was a red cross on the right 
shoulder. Becoming a soldier-knight was 
in those days called " the taking of the 
cross." Peter the Hermit, on a pilgrim- 
age to Jerusalem, had witnessed for him- 
self the pollution of the holy places by 
blasphemous Mahometans, and secured 
permission from the Patriarch of the East 



132 The Holy Grail 

and the Pope of the West to announce 
these pollutions to all Christendom, with 
an appeal for redress and deliverance. 
Pope Urban II. gave him the enthusiastic 
support of his influence and his eloquence. 
At Clermont, in the year 1095, the great 
orator addressed a vast concourse com- 
posed largely of proud knights, whose 
chief business had hitherto been plunder 
and feud. " Yea," he exclaimed, " the 
knighthood of Christ hath even plundered 
Christ's fold, exchanging the deeds of a 
knight for the works of night. As ye 
love your souls, now go forth boldly, and, 
quitting this mutual slaughter, take up 
arms for the household of faith. Christ 
himself will be your leader, as, more val- 
iantly than did the Israelites of old, you 
fight for your Jerusalem. It will be a 
goodly thing to die in that city, where 
Christ died for you. Let not love of any 
earthly possession detain you. It were 



The Crusaders 133 

better to die in warfare than behold the 
evils that befall the holy places. Start 
upon the way to the holy sepulchre; 
wrench the land from the accursed race, 
and subdue it to yourselves. Thus shall 
you spoil your foes of their wealth and re- 
turn home victorious, or else, purpled 
with your own blood, receive an everlast- 
ing reward." As the voice of the speaker 
died away, there went up one cry from 
the assembled host : " It is the will of 
God! It is the will of God," Then 
raising his eyes to heaven and stretching 
out his hand for silence, Urban renewed 
his speech with words of praise: ' This 
day hath been fulfilled in your midst the 
saying of our Lord, ' Where two or 
three are gathered together in my name, 
there am I in the midst of them.' Had 
not the Lord been in your midst, you 
would not thus have all uttered the same 
cry. Wherefore I tell you it is God who 



134 The Holy Grail 

hath inspired you with His voice. So let 
the Lord's motto be your battle-cry, and 
when you go forth to meet the enemy this 
shall be your watchword : ' It is the will 
of God ! It is the will of God !' " The 
multitudes flung themselves prostrate be- 
fore the sign of the uplifted cross. Proud 
knights bent the knee, and even grovelled 
in the dust, before the sign of Calvary, 
pledging with kisses and with vows their 
devotion unto death. On the right shoul- 
der the insignia were affixed; garments 
were destroyed that each might bear 
proudly on his shoulder the sign and seal 
of his undying devotion, even the red, the 
bloody cross. The Crusades were wars 
for the cross. The thought uppermost in 
the hearts of all re-awakened Europe at 
that time was this, and this alone: The 
Taking of the Cross. 

What transformation is denoted by that 
phrase! The cross had been, but a few 



The Crusaders 135 

centuries before, the symbol of unuttera- 
ble shame. Crucifixion was the lowest of 
deaths ; men spoke of " the ignominious 
death of the cross," a death of peculiar 
shame, reserved for the lowest degraded 
criminals. Yet now, in those ages of the 
Crusades, it had become a badge of honor, 
worn proudly by the lordliest knights. It 
is a wonderful transformation — as though 
in our day men were to begin to paint the 
gallows upon their coats of arms. Think 
of what it means ! A Jewish peasant, bear- 
ing the common name of Jesus, had spent 
three years of his life in such a way as to 
make even his own family say that he was 
" beside himself." Deserted at the last 
even by his own chosen twelve, one of 
them delivered him into the hands of 
Roman soldiers, who mocked him, 
scourged him, slapped him, and spat in his 
face, the victim of their cruel Saturnalian 
feast. His boasted crown turned out to 



136 The Holy Grail 

be but a crown of thorns, plaited by the 
coarse thick fingers of some Roman 
guardsman. For his sceptre, they put a 
reed into his hand. Then they knelt, with 
mocking laughter, and hailed him as a 
king. Silent, pale, helpless, he could not 
save himself. So the Roman soldiers 
crucified him, and speared him, and at 
the foot of the cross raffled away his gar- 
ments. So died he : in perfect loneliness, 
utter defeat, and profoundest shameful- 
ness. Yet, because of a rumor that spread 
abroad shortly after his death, people 
began to believe in him again, and a sect 
sprang up. This sect gained a following 
at length in Rome ; because, as the citizen 
Tacitus bitterly confesses, everything 
worthless and vile drifted to the capital. 
Nero burnt these fanatics. Trajan out- 
lawed them. The gentle Aurelius did not 
scruple to murder them. Decius slew 
them wholesale. Diocletian and Galerius 



The Crusaders 137 

sought them out man by man, woman by 
woman, child by child, determined that 
not one of the vermin should remain to 
corrupt the Roman State. Then, after 
two hundred and fifty years of this fierce 
and bloody work, the State rested in 
weary satisfaction and celebrated its vic- 
tory. 

But the next emperor is a Christian. 
He takes the eagles from his standards, 
and replaces them with crosses. The 
badge of shame becomes a sign of glory. 
He bids his Roman soldiers fight in the 
name of the crucified Jew. Roman sol- 
diers bow the knee to Him whom Roman 
soldiers scourged. Again do they put a 
crown upon His head and a sceptre in His 
hand, but not in scorn. Jesus is their 
King, above Caesar. Galilee has con- 
quered Rome. The empire becomes Chris- 
tian by imperial decree. Christians, no 
longer wandering about in deserts or 



138 The Holy Grail 

dwelling in the caves of the earth, drive 
in gilded chariots of state, becoming the 
most honored officers of the empire. They 
have exchanged their goat-skins for bro- 
cade, the purple of mourning for the pur- 
ple of rule. The poor are rich, the de- 
based are exalted, the vanquished are the 
victors. " Constantine the Defender" 
succeeds " Galerius the Butcher." The 
Crusaders did but follow Constantine 
when they took the cross; and millions 
since have followed the Crusaders in 
choosing as their highest, proudest symbol 
that which was, till Jesus died, the badge 
of shame. To-day it is the centre of our 
noblest paintings. Women wear it pen- 
dant on their breasts. Plain men choose 
it as their single ornament. Our books 
are stamped with it. It gleams, gilded, 
from the summit of our noblest architec- 
ture. And always there dwells in this 
simple transverse figure a dignity and 



The Crusaders 139 

glory belonging to no other symbol 
known to man. 

Why is it so? Why this remarkable 
transformation of an ancient gallows into 
a modern emblem of glory? Marvellous 
as it may seem, this is the simple reason : 
because that outlawed Jew did die 
thereon. Because this cross was the scaf- 
fold of the Man of Nazareth ; because it 
upbore in death His suffering body, there- 
fore it has become a symbol loved and 
adored and glorious. He it was that up- 
lifted it. Because of Him who bore the 
cross did Roman emperors weave it with 
gold upon their purple standards. And it 
was supreme devotion to Jesus Christ, a 
thousand years after He had died, and in 
the darkest of all ages since the black year 
of His death — it was supreme devotion to 
Him that led those millions of Crusaders 
to the taking of the cross. Let us seize 
this thought ir all its full significance: 



140 The Holy Grail 

the supreme attractiveness of that grand 
figure whose death could glorify a gal- 
lows ! " I, if I be lifted up," said He, 
" will draw all men unto me." Superbly 
is that prophecy proved true. Hearts of 
iron have leaped irresistibly and forever 
unto Him, the Great Magnet. Thousands 
of earth's knightliest souls have taken the 
cross and followed Him. 

Beginning with His own earliest disci- 
ples — what a splendid vision had the be- 
loved John of the supreme kingliness of 
Jesus ! " Behold a white horse ! And He 
that is seated thereon is called Faithful 
and True, and in righteousness He doth 
judge and make war. His eyes are as a 
flaming fire, and on His head are many 
crowns — many crowns! And He hath a 
Name written, which no man knoweth, 
but He Himself. And He is clothed in 
a vesture dipped in blood ; and His Name 
is called the Word of God. And the arm- 



The Crusaders 141 

ies which are in heaven follow Him, upon 
white horses, clothed in fine linen, white 
and clean. And He hath on His vesture 
and on His thigh a Name written, King 
of kings and Lord of lords." Simple 
contact for three short years with this su- 
perb crucified King uplifted humble John 
the fisherman into John the rapt seer, the 
poet, and the saint. Think also of that 
other Galilean fisherman; hard-handed, 
harsh, soiled with his unseemly trade, 
whose brittle character was transformed 
into the Rock of the Church through the 
impartation of the knightliness of Jesus: 
" Who," as Cephas cries with divine en- 
thusiasm— " Who did no sin, neither was 
guile found in His mouth; Who, when 
He was reviled, reviled not again ; when 
He suffered, He threatened not; but com- 
mitted Himself to Him that judgeth 
righteously." So, by the firm yet gentle 
and supremely faithful knightliness of his 



142 The Holy Grail 

Leader was this impetuous, uncouth and 
faithless fisherman transformed into one 
who was faithful to his Master even unto 
death, humbly requesting, when they led 
him, too, to be crucified, that they affix 
him to the cross head downwards, since 
he was not worthy even to die in the same 
manner as had his knightly Lord. 

Ah, those white-clad heavenly armies 
of John's vision — those ascended follow- 
ers of Jesus, who follow in their Master's 
train: see them as they march, that glo- 
rious cavalry, clothed in glistening linen, 
white and clean! Hear their shouts of 
supreme devotion to Him for whose sake 
they were led on earth to take the cross, 
whereas now in heaven they wear the 
crown. Leading that host of white-clad 
armies is the fine old chieftain of Tarsus, 
who fought a good fight, who kept the 
faith, and who went half regretfully 
(since to live was Christ) to the gain of 



The Crusaders 143 

the crown of righteousness, his meed for 
the taking of the cross. Once he had de- 
spised that cross. But a single eye-to- 
eye vision of the kingly Christ trans- 
formed him from enemy to friend. Hear 
his devotion utter itself in angelic elo- 
quence as he cries : " For I am persuaded 
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor 
principalities, nor powers, nor things pres- 
ent, nor things to come, nor height, nor 
depth, nor any other creature, shall be able 
to separate us from the love of God, which 
is in Christ Jesus our Lord." " Unto this 
King eternal, immortal, invisible, the 
Only Wise God, be honor and glory for 
ever and ever !" 

Out of those thousands voices of as- 
cended knights a few dim echoes come to 
us. Hear Augustine's ascription of devo- 
tion to his Leader, as he cries : " O Truth 
who art Eternity! And Love who art 
Truth! And Eternity who art Love! 



1U The Holy Grail 

Thou art my All, to Thee do I sigh night 
and day. When I first knew Thee, Thou 
liftedst me up, that I might see there was 
somewhat for me to see, and that I was 
not yet such as to see. And Thou stream- 
ing forth Thy beams of light upon me 
most strongly, didst beat back the weak- 
ness of my sight, and I trembled with 
love and awe: and I perceived myself to 
be far off from Thee in the region of un- 
likeness." And yet — " For Thyself Thou 
madest us; and our hearts are restless 
until they rest in Thee." There comes to 
us also the impassioned voice of the monk 
Bernard, who preached the Second Cru- 
sade : " If thou writest, nothing therein 
hath savor to me unless I read Jesus in it. 
If thou discoursest, nothing there is agree- 
able to me unless in it also ' Jesus' re- 
sounds. He is as honey in the mouth, a 
melody in the ear, a song of jubilee in the 
heart. He is our medicine as well. Is 



The Crusaders 145 

any among you saddened? Let Jesus 
enter into his heart, and thence leap to his 
lips, and lo! at the rising illumination of 
His name, every cloud flies away, serenity 
returns." Often are the words of this 
mediaeval monk on our lips as we sing, 

Jesus, the very thought of thee, 
With sweetness fills my breast, 

But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
And in Thy presence rest. 

Next we hear the peaceful prayer of 
the German mystic, Thomas a Kempis: 
" Grant to me above all things that can 
be desired, to rest in Thee, and in Thee 
to have my heart at peace. Thou art the 
true peace of the heart, Thou its only rest ; 
out of Thee all things are hard and rest- 
less. In this very peace, that is, in Thee, 
Thou One Chiefest Eternal Good, I will 
sleep and rest." 

The turbulent Luther, whose words 
were "half-battles," turns for peace and 



146 The Holy Grail 

soothing to the gentle Cross-Bearer, whis- 
pering ever so gently to his heart, " Keep 
still, and He will mould thee into the 
right shape." A hundred years later, 
we hear the consecrated voice of Francis 
de Sales pledging his will to Christ's in 
everything; "without reserve, without a 
' but,' an ' if,' or a limit." Then Fenelon 
offers himself in total sacrifice with the 
words : " Smite, or heal ; depress me, or 
raise me up; I adore all Thy purposes 
without knowing them; I am silent; I 
offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself 
to Thee; I would have no other desire 
than to do Thy will." In our own time, 
there has lately entered into the company 
of that white-clad throng one who prayed : 
" O Lord, who art as the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land, who beholdest 
Thy weak creatures weary of labor, 
weary of pleasure, weary of hope de- 
ferred, weary of self ; in Thine abundant 



The Crusaders 147 

compassion, and unutterable tenderness, 
bring us, I pray thee, unto Thy rest." 
And then the clear-eyed Christian poet of 
the South, Sidney Lanier ; hear him, after 
he has set all of earth's greatest names 
beside the name of Jesus, how he cries 
with transcendent admiration : 

But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, 

But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 

But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, 

O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 

O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,— 

What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 

What least defect or shadow of defect, 

What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 

Of inference loose, what lack of grace 

Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — 

Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 

Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ? 

What a goodly company have followed 
Jesus in the taking of the cross ! How 
many thousands of stainless knights have 
claimed Him as their leader ! Truly, after 



148 The Holy Grail 

this brief backward glance into the devo- 
tional history of the purest hearts that 
ever have throbbed on this old earth, we 
may sing with new understanding the 
words of that grand ancient hymn, the 
hymn of the valiant Crusaders them- 
selves. As they marched on their ven- 
turous quest against His foes, the fair 
meadow-lands of France smiled to them 
of the gentle love of Christ, and the 
mighty German forests whispered of His 
majesty. In the dazzling Eastern sun 
that shone by day they saw His light, and 
in the silent wonders of the heavens by 
night they read His glory. To this ter- 
rible army with banners all created things 
did but speak of Him their Creator, Who 
was to them the Bright and Morning 
Star, the One Among Ten Thousand, 
and the Altogether Lovely. Thus it is 
that the music of this great " Crusaders' 
Hymn" rolls through the ages down to 



The Crusaders 149 

us, throbbing with the martial tread of 
the armies of the Lord of Hosts, pulsing 
with the heart's devotion of a myriad of 
Christian knights — 

Beautiful Saviour ! King of Creation, 
True Son of God and Son of Man! 

Truly I'd love Thee, truly I'd serve Thee, 
Knight of my soul, my Joy, my Crown ! 

Fair are the meadows, fairer the woodlands, 
Robed in the flowers of blooming spring; 

Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer, 

He makes our sorrowing spirits sing. 

Fair is the sunshine, fairer the moonlight, 
And all the sparkling stars on high ; 

Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer, 
Than all the angels in the sky. 

Beautiful Saviour ! King of Creation ! 

True Son of God and Son of Man ! 
Glory and honor, praise, adoration, 

Now and forevermore be Thine. 



LIBERTY AND LAW 



LIBERTY AND LAW* 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF PATRIOTISM 

It may be set forth almost as an axiom 
that every virtue has its counterfeit, 
which is invariably vicious. Bravery 
is the essential virtue of manhood, but its 
counterfeit is the bravado of the bully, 
which may degenerate into vicious bru- 
tality. At the other extreme, the gen- 
tleness of a gentleman is certainly a vir- 
tue, but effeminacy is the accompaniment 
of cowardice. Neatness has its counter- 
feit in foppery, economy in miserliness, 
culture in pedantry, devoutness in cant, 

* Delivered before the Southern Educational 
Association at Jacksonville, Florida, under the 
title, " The School as a Check upon Lawlessness." 

153 



154 The Holy Grail 

purity in prudery, humility in servility, 
love in lust, and pure patriotism in impure 
politics. 

It is so with the great twin truths 
whereon society is founded : I mean lib- 
erty and law. The counterfeit of law is 
tyranny, while that of liberty is license, 
which is only another name for lawless- 
ness. Liberty and law are twin sisters, 
bound together by a closer unity than the 
famous Siamese twins, so that to hurt the 
one is to maim the other. But tyranny 
and license are enormous antipodal evils 
united only in their antagonism to the 
State. 

Men have always shown a tendency to 
drive these two great principles of law 
and liberty into their counterfeit vicious 
extremes, and to this fatal fact may be 
traced all of the woes of government. It 
is true of Church as well as of State. The 
religion that we profess is ultimately 



Liberty and Law 155 

founded on the conception of the Divine 
Fatherhood. Now, fatherhood implies 
both liberty and law. Because the father 
loves his child, he wishes the child to be 
free; for liberty is of the essence of love.* 
But the wise father knows that liberty can 
be attained only through law. To give 
the child license would be to subvert his 
best interests; he would never have lib- 
erty at all, because his lower nature 
would inevitably control his higher na- 
ture and the worst sort of slavery result. 
Therefore law is as much the outcome of 
love as liberty is. The earlier Jews had 
a beautiful comprehension of this fact. 
David praises God for His " free spirit," 
but never ignores His " perfect law." He 
unites the two under a conception of fath- 
erhood both majestic and tender, which 
reaches its wonderful acme in the twenty- 

* Both words arise from the Teutonic Lub. 



156 The Holy Grail 

third Psalm, wherein we hear of rod and 
staff, but also of still waters and green 
pastures. Had the sheep license, he would 
go astray; God's law keeps him in lib- 
erty. The later Jews, however, forgot the 
liberal heart of God, and laid all em- 
phasis on His law. This made them at 
length conceive of Him as a tyrant, and 
Pharisaism was the outcome of this tyran- 
nous conception. Then the Gospel came. 
I do not hesitate to say that its great ob- 
ject, considered from one point of view, 
was just to restore the unity of law and 
liberty in men's ideas about God. But the 
reaction in behalf of liberty tended to 
swing out into lawlessness, so that we hear 
Peter, the great apostle of authority, 
warning the early Christians against 
using their liberty for a cloak of malic- 
iousness,* while Paul, the apostle of lib- 

* i Peter ii. 16. 



Liberty and Law 157 

erty, calls love the fulfilling of the law.* 
The woes of the Church from that day 
to this have come from a sort of alterna- 
ting emphasis upon law or upon liberty, in- 
stead of an equal unifying emphasis on 
both, so that she has suffered now from 
ecclesiastical tyranny, and again from 
antinomian license. 

History abounds in similar illustra- 
tions. How has it been with America? 
Our tendency from the very beginning 
has led us to emphasize liberty at the ex- 
pense of law. The country was discov- 
ered and settled under the influence of a 
vast revolt against tyranny. The intel- 
lectual revolt dates from the year 1453, 
when the gates of the Golden Horn at 
last moved on their ancient hinges, flood- 
ing all Europe from the classical springs 



* Romans xiii. 10. 



158 The Holy Grail 

of the East. It was the impetus of the 
Renaissance that impelled the little Span- 
ish caravel across the stormy seas; the 
discovery of America was a direct result 
of the downfall of Constantinople. Larger 
revolts were sure to follow: the Refor- 
mation is the religious side of the Renais- 
sance. It was under the influence of the 
tremendous protest against tyranny begun 
by Martin Luther in 15 17 that this coun- 
try was settled by those colonists that 
have meant most to her history — the Puri- 
tans and the Huguenots and the Salz- 
burgers, whose very names have Protes- 
tant associations. Moreover, these and 
other colonists, led hither by love of lib- 
erty, found themselves in a vast untram- 
melled continent to breathe whose air was 
to become, as it were, drunk with a sense 
of freedom. The Revolutionary War was 
an inevitable consequence of such condi- 
tions. Its success led to the foundation 



Liberty and Law 159 

of a republic upon principles that seek a 
maximum of liberty by means of an irre- 
ducible minimum of law. Whenever this 
minimum is still further diminished 
through blindness to the equable princi- 
ples of government, the fundamental bal- 
ance is at once destroyed and liberty de- 
scends into license. We sadly need at this 
hour a strong readjustment of the scales. 
Who will deny this? 

Take, for example, the law as applied 
to the protection of human life, which is 
supposed to be its primary function. The 
individualist frenzy of libertinism has 
been carried to such a degree in this 
" land of the free" that human life is act- 
ually ten times cheaper to-day in the 
United States than in the pagan empire 
of Japan.* In a valuable address deliv- 

* For the statistics, see article by Dr. Julius 
D. Dreher in The State, Columbia, for October 
18, 1004. 



160 The Holy Grail 

ered at the St. Louis Fair, Judge William 
H. Thomas, of Alabama, indicated the 
unenviable pre-eminence of the United 
States in the number of annual homicidal 
crimes. In the German Empire there are 
about five homicides committed annually 
for every million of the population; in 
England and Wales, ten or eleven; in 
France, fourteen or fifteen; in Belgium, 
sixteen, and in the United States about 
130. We have been accustomed to charge 
our crimes upon the foreigner ; but these 
figures do not justify that view; and 
Judge Thomas further points out the 
striking fact that among the five sub- 
divisions of our country " the two geo- 
graphic divisions having the most foreign- 
born show the lowest rate of homicides." 
A dozen years ago we were all reading 
a startling book bearing the suggestive 
title, " In Darkest London." This city is 
noted for a combination of conditions that 



Liberty and Law 161 

tend to breed crime, — such as racial mix- 
ture, depressing climate, density of popu- 
lation, and comparative illiteracy. Its 
crowded slums would seem to furnish a 
veritable hotbed for vice and lawlessness. 
I have therefore been interested in a com- 
parison between the homicidal record of 
" darkest London" for 1903 and that of 
my own adopted State, which I choose for 
illustration because I wish to be impartial. 
London has an area of 688 square miles, 
with a population of 6,500,000; that is to 
say, 9,500 people inhabit every square 
mile in London. South Carolina has an 
area of 30,570 square miles and a popu- 
lation somewhat exceeding 1,340,000; 
that is to say, about forty-four people to 
the mile. In climate the State is richly 
favored, there is no greater average of 
white illiteracy than in London, and the 
aggravations of our race problem are off- 
set by racial admixtures among the 



162 The Holy Grail 

crowded slums of the world's metropo- 
lis. Every advantage is with the State 
as against the city. And yet London, 
with its six and a half million souls, 
had only twenty-four murders during the 
year in question, while in South Carolina, 
with a population of one and a half mil- 
lion, two hundred and twenty-two people 
were tried in the courts for homicide. Not 
only so, but in London there was no " un- 
discovered crime," as all the murderers 
were arrested, except in four cases, where 
they committed suicide. In South Caro- 
lina, however, we are told that " many 
homicides are committed for which no 
one is tried. Hence the actual number of 
homicides was considerably more than two 
hundred and twenty-two/' * The fig- 
ures are a little better now, but a striking 

*Dr. J. D. Dreher, The State, October 18, 
1004. 



Liberty and Law 163 

feature of the situation lies in the fact that 
even where criminals are arrested and 
tried the law is very seldom enforced. 

In the general matter of lawlessness, my 
own State is no worse than others of the 
Union. As I shall show, the lawlessness 
takes on different forms of expression, 
according as conditions vary. Judge 
Thomas, in the paper from which I have 
already quoted, shows conclusively that 
the variations in the enforcement of law 
do not seem to be due to climate, race, 
density of population, illiteracy, form of 
government, or length of governmental 
experience. The terrible facts cannot be 
explained by any of these theories, each 
of which has had able advocates I think 
that our deplorable national notoriety in 
the taking of human life is simply the 
result of a historical deluge of liberty, 
rising at last to the floodtide of license, 



164. The Holy Grail 

which is proving too strong for the pro- 
tective barriers of law. 

Perhaps the most alarming phase of 
the whole situation consists in the enor- 
mous increase of homicidal crime in this 
country within the past twenty-five years. 
If the same ratio between the number of 
homicides and the total population of the 
country now prevailed as was the case in 
1 88 1, there would have been less than two 
thousand homicides in 1903; but as a 
matter of fact there were nearly nine thou- 
sand. That is to say, twenty-five years 
ago twenty-five people were killed annu- 
ally out of every million of our popula- 
tion, but in 1903 we slaughtered one hun- 
dred and twelve per million, so that the 
danger of murder is four and one-half 
times greater in this country to-day than 
it was in 1881.* 

* For statistics see McClure's Magazine, De- 
cember, 1904. 



Liberty and Law 165 

But these figures, startling though they 
are, do not even yet begin to indicate the 
number of human lives that are sacrificed 
in this country every year as a direct re- 
sult of lawlessness. What of the Iro- 
quois Theatre horror and the General Slo- 
cum disaster? We claim to be a Chris- 
tian people, but those human bodies were 
really burnt in sacrificial offering to our 
American Moloch of greed. It has been 
proved beyond question that there were 
laws sufficient to prevent those disasters; 
but that the law-keepers were susceptible 
to bribery, and that the " captains of in- 
dustry" who owned the theatre and the 
steamboat preferred license to licenses. 
The railroads of the country kill more 
than seven thousand human beings every 
year, a record without parallel in any 
other country on earth; who shall say 
how many of these mutilated corpses are 
victims to the spirit of lawlessness? Mr. 



166 The Holy Grail 

S. S. McClure describes our wholesale 
criminals, if I may so term them, under 
three heads : First, saloon-keepers, gam- 
blers, and others who engage in businesses 
that degrade; second, contractors, capi- 
talists, bankers, and others who can make 
money by getting franchises and other 
property of the community cheaper by 
bribery than by paying the community; 
third, politicians who are willing to seek 
and accept office with the aid and endorse- 
ment of the classes already mentioned. 
He rightly says that these men " consti- 
tute a class of criminals very different 
from ordinary criminals who break laws ; 
these men destroy law. They are enemies 
of the human race. They are destroyers 
of a people. They are murderers of a 
civilization." 

The spirit of lawlessness covers the 
whole country. Its most tangible expres- 
sion is in the taking of human life, 



Liberty and Law 167 

whether by wholesale or retail. In the 
great cities, where the prevailing motives 
are commercial, we have holocausts. In 
the South, where the prevailing motives 
are social, we have lynchings. In certain 
communities, such as Chicago, San Fran- 
cisco, and Pittsburg, we murder both by 
wholesale and by retail. Everywhere we 
have license, and unless we can check it 
the country is doomed. 

There will not be any rapid transforma- 
tion in this matter, depend upon it. That 
is impossible. We shall have no marked 
change until a new generation comes upon 
the scene, trained to nobler ideals. We 
must begin with the child. There are 
three institutions that are theoretically 
concerned with child training: the fam- 
ily, the Church, and the school. I say 
" theoretically," because a glance at any 
of our comic papers will indicate the 
anomalous conditions of family life in this 



168 The Holy Grail 

country. Some one has caustically ob- 
served that " a problem in America has to 
begin by being a jest, and we laugh at 
our troubles long before we think of 
doing anything about them." Conse- 
quently, we have satires by our prominent 
humorists on " the bringing up of pa- 
rents/' but the parents have not yet 
learned to take the matter seriously. At 
least the father has not. In the theoretical 
home the mother stands for the principle 
of liberty or love, while the father stands 
for law; but in the practical American 
home the father usually stands for nothing 
at all. He is far too busy to give any 
attention to the duties of fatherhood. He 
is out in the market making money for his 
child, forgetting that the coin of charac- 
ter transcends every other kind of wealth. 
American children are deprived of the 
needful discipline of fatherhood, and the 
disobedient child inevitably grows into a 



Liberty and Law 169 

lawless citizen, for " men are but children 
of a larger growth." I say it with a sense 
of bitter shame, but I think we need 
hardly look to our present generation of 
homes, with their altarless hearths and 
their headless tables, for the instillation of 
lawfulness into our children. 

Nor yet, on the whole, to the Church. 
The Church in this country for the most 
part takes little account of the children. 
In Europe the Protestants have their pa- 
rochial or religious schools with daily in- 
struction in the fundamental truths of re- 
ligion, besides rigid catechetical systems. 
Over here we seem to think that one hour 
of one day in each week is time enough 
for the Church to devote to the children ; 
and what a strange sort of devotion it is ! 
You have heard that caustic conundrum, 
" When is a school not a school? When 
it's a Sunday-school." Better methods 
are coming to prevail within very recent 



170 The Holy Grail 

years, but I still submit that the average 
Sunday-school affords utterly inadequate 
opportunity for the moral training of chil- 
dren. 

There remains, then, the school as a 
possible check upon lawlessness. Is it 
possible? I believe so. I believe that it 
is actually within our reach, teachers of 
the men of to-morrow, to lay upon their 
hearts now while they are plastic chil- 
dren, such a regard for the dignity and 
sacredness of law as will forever keep our 
liberties secure. My plan is so simple 
that I fear you will smile at it, but re- 
member that our complex life breeds an 
undeserved and unworthy contempt of 
simple things. I wish that it might be 
made a part of the duty of every public- 
school teacher throughout the land just to 
teach the children the Ten Command- 
ments. They do not know them; where 
have they had a chance to learn them? 



Liberty and Law 171 

Do you think it would mean nothing to 
them in after-life, when tempted to do 
evil, to have these ineradicable law-words 
of childhood rise with an imperative 
" Thou shalt not" ? Then your theory of 
psychology is a very different one from 
mine. Among the supreme restraints of 
a grown man's life are the inlaid impera- 
tives of childhood. 

I think that the simplicity of my plan 
has one thing at least to commend it : no- 
body could object to it, whether Catholic 
or Protestant or Jew. Besides, the proper 
teaching of the Decalogue carries with it 
weightier matter than one might think. 
I would have the commandment " Thou 
shalt not steal" so taught as to include not 
only the petty thief, but also the million- 
aire. " By what process of reasoning can 
we make a moral distinction between the 
larceny of the despised green-goods or 
gold-brick swindler and the equally real 



172 The Holy Grail 

rich and quasi-respectable promoters of 
larceny accomplished, for example, by the 
the American Shipbuilding Company, that 
bubble of fraud, concerning which the 
public press has had so much to say re- 
cently?" * And yet, the "confidence 
man" is hurried off to prison as a past- 
master in swindling, while the " captain 
of industry" is held up before our ambi- 
tious youth as a past-master of " success." 
It is as Emerson said, we need to correct 
our theory of success; and the best cor- 
rective I can think of is a plain teaching 
of the Ten Commandments. 

I would have the ancient word, " Thou 
shalt not kill," taught to our children in 
the South to mean exactly what it says. 
Dr. Julius D. Dreher goes to the core of 
the matter when he writes : 

" The reports of lynching for the first 

* See George W. Alger on " Unpunished Com- 
mercial Crime," Atlantic Monthly, August, 1904. 



Liberty and Law 178 

few years always assigned as the cause 
the ' usual crime.' But it is no longer 
the usual crime that calls forth the ven- 
geance of the mob. If men may be 
lynched for rape, may they not also be 
lynched for murder? Very little reason 
satisfied the mob; in fact, it does not 
reason; it draws no fine distinctions. 
Vengeance is its motto. When the mob 
wanted to lynch a murderer it did so. 
And then the list of lynchable crimes 
grew longer and longer. After a while 
misdemeanors were added to the list and 
negroes have been lynched for trifling 
offences, for which our laws do not even 
provide a penalty. 

" Men who trample on the laws of 
course have no respect for courts; and 
so the mob enters even the temples of jus- 
tice to execute its lawless will. It takes 
prisoners from officers and jails when the 
hanging of such prisoners by the orderly 



174 The Holy Grail 

processes of the law is as certain as any- 
thing human can be. The mob usually 
confines itself to killing and occasionally 
burning negroes; but now and then a 
white man is the victim. In South Caro- 
lina three white men have been lynched by 
white men and one by negroes, which is, 
so far as I know, the only case in which 
negroes have lynched a white man. But 
negroes have lynched a number of ne- 
groes. 

" It is high time to inquire whither are 
we drifting. It seems to me that we have 
now drifted so far that all thoughtful per- 
sons ought to see plainly that the only po- 
sition for law-abiding and law-respecting 
people to take is this : That lynching for 
any crime whatever is itself a crime 
against our civilization. We cannot put 
down crime by committing other crimes. 
Lawlessness breeds lawlessness; hatred 
begets hatred; revenge incites revenge. 



Liberty and Law 175 

If we sow the wind we may expect to reap 
the whirlwind. If we sow lawlessness, 
hatred, revenge, cruelty, and brutality, we 
should not expect to enjoy the fair fruits 
of civilization. We should rather expect 
to raise the hydra-headed monster of an- 
archy and barbarism." 

There are others of these old command- 
ments that need new emphasis and plain 
interpretation. We need a new remem- 
brance of the Sabbath day ; a re-enforce- 
ment of filial piety; a purer social life; 
a cleanlier tongue and a heart that covets 
only the best gifts. Above all, we need 
to remember the supreme law, " Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
strength." 

I am not alone in my insistence upon 
this simple plan. The chancellor of New 
York University said at the opening of 
his session in 1903 : " I wish we could re- 
quire from every freshman a Sunday- 



176 The Holy Grail 

school diploma that would certify that he 
knew by heart the Ten Commandments, 
the sermon on the Mount, a church cate- 
chism of some kind, and a score of the 
Scripture Psalms and best classic hymns. 
This university will join any association of 
universites and colleges that will demand 
them as an entrance requirement." The 
truth is, we are exalting the intellect at the 
expense not only of the hand, but still 
more of the heart, in our educational sys- 
tems. We are in danger of deifying the 
mind, and of dethroning the morals by 
sheer neglect here in America. The facts 
that I have cited call aloud for new meth- 
ods in our schools, which seem to be the 
sole training places of the rising genera- 
tion. We must emphasize the law — that 
comprehensive moral law which is alone 
sufficient as a guide of human conduct. 
There is no danger that we exaggerate the 
importance of law; our entire environ- 



Liberty and Law 177 

ment, as I have tried to show, provides 
against that. I wish that we could have 
a simple text-book on " moral law" pre- 
pared for use in every school; teaching 
the sacredness of law as such, and based 
upon some such simple code as the Dec- 
alogue, with practical application to our 
modern needs. Meanwhile, we should 
face the facts. Nothing is ever to be 
gained by denying the truth, and the first 
step towards the quest for a remedy is the 
clear recognition of a disease. 



12 



THE CENTURY IN 
LITERATURE 



THE CENTURY IN 
LITERATURE 

A REVIEW AND A FORECAST 

A century is, of course, a purely arbi- 
trary division of time. If " a rose by any 
other name would smell as sweet," then a 
cycle of time would have equal signifi- 
cance if it included eighty years instead of 
a hundred, or began and ended at any 
points you please. The length of our cy- 
cles happens to be determined by our use 
of the decimal system, and the point of 
their beginning is fixed by the birth of 
Jesus. It is not always logical to cut 
human history into so many equal lengths, 
using a century instead of a yardstick, for 
often a great movement has nothing 
whatever to do with arbitrary divisions of 

time. 

181 



182 The Holy Grail 

Nevertheless it is usually proper to 
speak of the specific " character" of a 
century. While unreal distinctions ought 
not to be made, yet it is undoubtedly true 
in these later centuries, at least, that 
each of them has a certain individuality 
of its own. Perhaps this is due in a meas- 
ure to the quiet, unrealized influence of 
these arbitrary divisions of time. Is it not 
true that the whole of thoughtful man- 
kind, this very day seems to be agitated 
by an impression that we must somehow 
give distinctive character to this new- 
born Twentieth Century? There is no 
telling to what extent the history of Chris- 
tian civilization has come to be affected, 
during the course of the Christian ages, 
by the silent influence of the century idea. 

The progress of civilization is inevita- 
bly reflected by the history of literature; 
for literature, no less than art, always re- 
sponds to the dominant ideals of a time 



The Century in Literature 183 

and a people. As the great world spins 
" forever down the ringing grooves of 
change" the crystal lens of literature is 
continually focussing its varied moods 
and movements into a small, but accurate, 
photograph, which finally develops as the 
permanent record of the race. Herder 
was the first to formulate this truth, self- 
evident to us now, and since his time the 
historians of literature have been setting 
themselves to the task of producing a his- 
tory of civilization based upon the na- 
tional literatures. It is enough for the 
present purpose to call attention to the 
fact that an analysis of the English litera- 
ture of the nineteenth century will in ef- 
fect show forth the spiritual elements of 
the age itself as related to the English- 
speaking peoples. That is to say, the cen- 
tury in English literature will show the 
century in Anglo-Saxon life. So close is 



184 The Holy Grail 

the relationship between literature and 
life. 

The clear-cut character of the nine- 
teenth century in English literature is 
nothing short of remarkable. It differs 
as completely from the hundred years that 
went before as George Eliot differs from 
Lady Mary Montagu. Indeed, it were 
perhaps not over-fanciful to take these 
two women as literary types of their re- 
spective centuries, around whose living 
forms dead facts may be quickened into 
vivid truth. Being women, it is not im- 
possible that, with womanhood's quick 
sympathies and intuitions, they did some- 
how discern the very inmost spirit of the 
times in which they lived, — the Zeitgeist, 
as the Germans say ; being great women, 
it is not without the bounds of reason that 
they should somehow seize and actually 
embody in themselves that spirit, thus be- 
come incarnate. The claim has already 



The Century in Literature 185 

been advanced for Lady Mary Montagu. 
She has been called " the eighteenth cen- 
tury masquerading as a woman." " Like 
her age, she was absorbed in the shows of 
things." " She possesses its cleverness, 
its clear head, its brittle wit. She exhibits 
also its lack of strong natural feeling, its 
indifference to the primal truths of exist- 
ence, its tendency to sacrifice the Ten 
Commandments to an epigram. She was 
as much a product of her time as her acid 
friend and enemy, Pope; as the rocking- 
horse metre of the contemporary poetry; 
as the patched and powdered ladies of the 
court ; as the Whig and Tory parties ; as 
the polite infidelities of the fashionable." 
" Of the weakness and strength of that 
age of light without sweetness Lady Mary 
is representative" to a very marked de- 
gree. We get an index to the frivolous 
spirit of her times in the very name of the 
famous " Kit-Kat Club," which numbered 



186 The Holy Grail 

her as perhaps the chief of its reigning 
belles. Mr. Christopher Catt was an 
obliging caterer of fashionable London, 
famous for his excellent mutton pies. A 
circle of literary brilliancy, comprising the 
Dukes of Marlborough and Devonshire, 
Lord Halifax, Sir Robert Walpole, Con- 
greve, Granville and Addison, revolved 
around the savory tables of Mr. Christo- 
pher Catt, whose abbreviated name they 
lovingly appropriated, and so it was that 
the most famous literary circle of the 
eighteenth century in England became 
known as the Kit-Kat Club, whose deli- 
cate toasting glasses were each inscribec 
with a separate dainty couplet in honor ot 
some reigning belle. 

Now it is strikingly significant of the 
marked transition from the eighteenth tc 
the nineteenth century spirit that the Kit- 
Kat Club was superseded by the Blue 
Stocking Club, whose name is quite as 



The Century in Literature 187 

suggestive of seriousness as the earlier 
narne of frivolity. Our common word 
" bluestocking" comes to us through this 
club, whose members, especially in the 
person of a certain Mr. Benjamin Stilling- 
fleet, perpetuated the memory of the Bare- 
bone parliament by affecting to despise the 
dapper airs of the dandy world about 
them, particularly in the matter of hose. 
The decadent dandies derided this studied 
plainness of dress and the new cult was 
dubbed with its tenacious name from the 
character of Mr. Stillingfleet's stockings. 
A younger Mrs. Montagu, married to a 
cousin of the gay Lady Mary's husband, 
promptly occupied the stage when the old 
Lady Mary disappeared, and became 
straightway known as " the Queen of the 
Blues." Around her sober tables gathered 
such disciples of the new regime as Lyt- 
telton, Burke, Samuel Johnson, and 
Joshua Reynolds. Her younger associ- 



188 The Holy Grail 

ates included such serious feminine spirits 
as Hannah More and Frances Burney. 
Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, disdaining to 
waste her precious time on frivolous let- 
ters of travel, assailed even the sprightly 
Voltaire with a heavy " Essay on Shakes- 
peare." She and her associates, the verita- 
ble Methodists of literature, accepted the 
derisive name of their light foes, and so 
rightly did they attune their spirits to the 
changed key of the incoming age that the 
nineteenth century may well be called, in 
token of their keen if somewhat pedantic 
discernment, the Bluestocking Century. 
Robert Burns it was who, a poet-prophet, 
living in the eighteenth century, but be- 
longing to the nineteenth — Robert Burns 
foresaw the approaching change in its 
deepest and noblest aspects, giving expres- 
sion to the Sartor Resartus idea in those 
manly, ringing lines that may well stand 



The Century in Literature 189 

for all that is best in our bluestocking 

age: 

What tho' on hamely fare we dine, 

Wear hoddin gray, and a' that? 

Give fools their silks and knaves their wine, 

A man's a man for a' that; 

For a' that, an a' that, 

Their tinsel show, and a' that ; 

The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 

Is king o' men for a' that. 

A hundred years ago to-day the horizon 
of English literature was bright with 
promise. The mild glories of the Lake 
School, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
and Southey, were already apparent. 
Three boys were then living — Byron, 
Shelley, and Keats — whose influence was 
to give to nineteenth century poetry its 
most distinctive formal characteristics. 
Across the sea a precocious lad was 
shortly to write a remarkable poem which 
should stand as a type of a young and 
precocious development in English litera- 



190 The Holy Grail 

ture that must hereafter compel the sub- 
divisions " British" and "American." 
Walter Scott was just rising into fame, 
and the American youth was living who 
should describe the romance of our own 
pioneer life with Scott as his living model. 
Hallam was preparing to devote himself 
to history, Milman and Grote and Pres- 
cott were lively lads, Macaulay and 
George Bancroft were infants. Lamb and 
Landor and De Quincey were polishing 
their styles to perfection in secret, while 
Washington Irving was about to become 
the first American writer of wide distinc- 
tion. Carlyle was a child in Dumfries- 
shire ; his spirtual kinsman, Emerson, was 
born in 1803 in Boston; and Hawthorne 
in the year succeeding. 

But the year 1809 was to be the red- 
letter year of the century. Over in Eng- 
land, all within that darling twelvemonth 
of the natal gods, were to be born the 



The Century in Literature 191 

greatest scientist, the greatest statesman, 
the greatest poet, the greatest poetess, and 
the greatest poetical translator that the 
lavish century bestowed on Anglo-Saxon 
peoples — Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson, 
Elizabeth Barrett* (Browning), and the 
marvellous Edward Fitzgerald. America 
was scarcely less favored; for that same 
bright year bequeathed to us our most bril- 
liant poet, Poe; our most popular man- 
of-letters, Holmes; and a statesman to 
whom impartial history will yet assign a 
station greater than Gladstone's, and even 
a place in American literature as the mas- 
ter of strenuous Shakespearean prose. 
Longfellow and Whittier were born two 
years before. Thus early in the century 
had been mustered, for the most part, 
those creative and critical forces that were 
destined to glorify the Victorian era with 
a splendor only less bright than the spa- 

* Some chronologies give 1806. 



192 The Holy Grail 

cious golden days of Good Queen Bess. A 
dozen years later and the roll of the real 
immortals was complete, if we except a 
few brilliant names that belong rather to 
the new century than to the old. Brown- 
ing in poetry, Thackeray and Dickens and 
George Eliot in fiction, Ruskin and Ar- 
nold and Lowell in essay — add these to 
the catalogue already cited, and you have 
the two-score largest names in nineteenth 
century English literature, and the cen- 
tury but a score of years old. 

The century in English literature has 
been marked by three distinguishing ele- 
mental features — a wide possession of 
facts, an earnest hunger for truth, and a 
profound resulting sadness. Let us 
briefly inquire as to what this means. 

The century opened in a whirlwind of 
revolution. It was the time of a new Re- 
naissance; a time only to be compared 
with the wonderful revival of thought that 



The Century in Literature 193 

followed the downfall of Constantinople 
in 1453. Rousseau's " Contrat Social," 
and the " Doctrine of the Rights of Man," 
formulated by Rousseau's disciples, were 
the Turks that took France. And the 
downfall of the French Empire liberated 
quite as many forces throughout Europe 
as had escaped through the gates of the 
Golden Horn. That vast complex move- 
ment, known as the French Revolution, 
proved to be one of the greatest stimu- 
lants that ever quickened the mind of man, 
— by no means altogether wholesome, let 
us say, yet none the less mighty for that. 
Second only to the impetus of the French 
Revolution was the influence of a single 
German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. 
His " Critique of Pure Reason" has 
shaped the spirit of the age to an extent 
that cannot be estimated. The mind of 
the world suddenly seized hold of the 
magical key of law, — a key to unlock all 
13 



194 The Holy Grail 

riddles. Chaotic nature was quickly re- 
duced to order, and natural laws patiently 
traced to their sources yielded veritable 
Golcondas of facts. Marvellous inven- 
tions and discoveries sprang into exist- 
ence from nowhere. The mind of the 
world has had a solemn, wide sweep of 
sheer facts. It is as though a seeker in 
the dark for rare gems had been suddenly 
set down amid glittering acres of dia- 
monds, — such is the contrast between the 
opulence of nineteenth century enlighten- 
ment and the poverty of the ages just pre- 
ceding. Naturally, humanity was dazzled 
and blinded. Old facts seemed unreal or 
incomparably mean when seen by the side 
of the new. Moreover, it was felt that 
the old foundations of facts were faulty 
and that truth must be searched for anew. 
In other words, science revolutionized 
philosophy, overturning inadequate theo- 
ries with its deluge of irresistible facts, 



The Century in Literature 195 

and men were swept from their precious 
footholds by a rising flood of materialism. 
Some of them asked the flippant, bitter 
question, " What is truth?" and were con- 
tent to float with the tide, careless of aim 
or of anchorage. But be it said to the 
everlasting glory of this turbulent age 
that the great majority of its thoughtful 
scholars have quested eagerly to set their 
feet upon the rock of truth beneath the 
sea of facts, not content to lose faith in 
the spiritual because they had found such 
wide knowledge of the material. Quite 
unlike the century preceding, it has never 
for a moment been satisfied with " the 
shows of things." With all of its mani- 
fold tools and talents it probed search- 
ingly down through the understood rind 
of the world towards the deep hidden 
heart where the truth is. Note how the 
literary stream of the century shunted off 
from its strenuous current those bubbles 



196 The Holy Grail 

and small surface movements that mur- 
mured of "art for art's sake." The 
English literary art of the age has been 
profoundly concerned with a motive, a 
deep soul-hunger for truth. The mind 
has reached out in a wide possession of 
facts, but the will has driven it onward 
into a dim and shadowy sphere, where 
one believes, although he cannot see, that 
those things dwell which are eternal. 
This characteristic double chord of patent 
fact and latent truth is sounded with ma- 
jestic resonance in those rare verses that 
are too little known : 

The centre fire heaves underneath the earth, 
And the earth changes like a human face; 
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, 
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright 
In hidden mines, spots barren river beds, 
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask — 
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are 

edged 
With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate, 



The Century in Literature 197 

When, in the solitary waste, strange groups 
Of young volcanoes come up, Cyclops-like, 
Staring together with their eyes on flame — 
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod; 
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure 
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, 
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; 
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swollen 

with blooms 
Like chrysalids impatient for the air; 
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run 
Along the furrows, ants make their ado; 
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark 
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; 
Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain, and God renews 
His ancient rapture. 

I have quoted this eloquent passage not 
only because of its aptness to denote the 
clinging faith in the vague unseen which 



198 The Holy Grail 

abides amid the multiplicity of clearly per- 
ceived material facts, but also because of 
its pervasive sadness. The poem illus- 
trates all three of the dominant elements 
of the century in English literature. The 
element of melancholy is often the least 
obtrusive, but the most thoroughly perva- 
sive of the three. The scope of our knowl- 
edge has been so vast that it has teased 
and oppressed the mind. The grip of our 
faith has been maintained chiefly by sheer 
force of heart power. In a word, it has 
been an age of transition, and the soul is 
always sad when it is not at rest. The 
renovated home that it will eventually 
enter will doubtless be a far more stately 
mansion than the " outgrown shell" it left 
behind, and sadness is no doubt a good 
soul-medicine, but the fact remains that 
a time of passage is a time of travail. 
Gone is all that brilliant persiflage, that 
heartless gayety, of the century preceding. 



The Century in Literature 199 

Even our gayety is sad and forced. There 
were those who sought to drive them- 
selves, fact-bewildered, into an arid desert 
of universal scepticism, but their mirth 
was hollow mockery, their laughter only 
an abnormal sobbing. Byron, rightly 
read, is one of the saddest of poets. It is 
as when the French Baudelaire exclaims : 
" One should always be drunk ! That is 
all, the whole question. In order not to 
feel the horrible burden of time, which is 
breaking your shoulders and bearing you 
to earth, you must be drunk without cease, 
on wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose. 
But get drunk !" Such terrible confessions 
merely betray the awful pain of the hun- 
gry heart, the intensity of a desire which 
has turned at last in the lassitude of dull 
despair from its quest. 

Those others, great-souled, who yet 
have persevered, are also immeasurably 
sad. The best that the best of them can 



200 The Holy Grail 

do, with all their strength of grasp and 
dogged hopefulness, is just to " cleave 
ever to the sunnier side of doubt" — to 
" follow The Hleam," which shifts and slips 
on far-off spiritual landscapes, in lieu of 
open sunshine near at hand. It has been 
an age of profound sadness, because the 
alert mind has opened the whole wide uni- 
verse to our bewildered ken, and the 
hungry soul has driven persistently 
through these multifold dumb shows of 
things in a passionate thirst for the truth, 
which should lie beyond, only to find itself 
as yet in a place of large shadows, be- 
wildered, afraid and yet hopeful — groping 
towards a far-off " kindly light." That is 
what the English literature of the nine- 
teenth century really means, whether it be 
the philosophy of Spencer or the criticism 
of Arnold, the essay of Carlyle or the 
poetry of Stephen Phillips, the history of 
Buckle of the fiction of Mrs. Humphrey 



The Century in Literature 201 

Ward. " Never," says Paul Desjardins, 
" have men been more universally sad 
than in the present time." And one of the 
most eloquent of living American men of 
letters adds : " Never was literary art 
more perfect, more accomplished, more 
versatile and successful than in the pres- 
ent age. Never have its laws been more 
widely understood and its fascinations 
more potently exercised. Never has 
it evoked more magical and charming 
forms to float above an abyss of disen- 
chantment and nothingness. A gray 
shadow of melancholy spreads over the 
questioning, uncertain, disillusioned 
age." * 

Attainment and the unattainable — 
these dominant notes of nineteenth cen- 
tury life produce in literature an all-per- 

* Henry van Dyke, in " The Gospel for an Age 
of Doubt." 



202 The Holy Grail 

vasive minor chord, and almost any repre- 
sentative author may be studied for the 
proof thereof. But it is a woman who 
becomes the veritable sibyl of her age, its 
greatest representative writer in the strict 
significance of that term, because with her 
delicate feminine intuitions she gathered 
all its subtle influences within herself and 
then by virtue of a wonderful virile mind 
set them forth in an eloquent unity. Her 
knowledge ? It ranged with the sweep of 
science to the farthest stars, or delved 
with infinite patience into the musty tomes 
of the past, wide, deep, and untiring. At 
the Sunday gatherings in her London 
home one might meet in a single after- 
noon such ruling spirits of the century as 
Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, Tennyson, 
Browning, Turgenieff, and Richard Wag- 
ner, with others. Such was the magnetic 
power of her sympathetic temperament, so 
great was her capacity for responsiveness, 



The Century in Literature 208 

that this homely woman compelled the 
tribute of giants, and from their store of 
learning she took the best they had to 
give. Her books are laden with instruc- 
tiveness in every line. Her facts were 
always scientifically correct. One of the 
most critical of living historical scholars 
has called her portraiture of mediaeval 
Florence " a picture executed with an ac- 
curacy and completeness worthy of an 
exact scholar/' and this is characteristic, 
not only of " Romola," but of every book 
she wrote. And yet, withal, she was 
profoundly dissatisfied with mere facts. 
There was an absorbing quest for the 
truth in every line she penned. Her 
novels, while not didactic and conse- 
quently inartistic, were inevitably per- 
vaded by a moral. Never has pen been 
moved to a more serious measure, or with 
more earnest purpose, than the pen of this 
woman novelist, who probed through 



204 The Holy Grail 

facts for the truth. She probed, but she 
did not find it. She believed it was there 
to the end, but it always somehow eluded 
her. One who knew her says that she 
worked with a " brave despair." Does 
not this precisely characterize the solemn 
note that sounds even through her sing- 
ing? And this same friend has told us 
how at Cambridge he walked with her in 
a garden, " on an evening of rainy May ; 
and she, stirred somewhat beyond her 
wont, and taking as her text the three 
words which have been used so often as 
the inspiring trumpet calls of men, the 
words God, immortality, duty — pro- 
nounced, with terrible earnestness, how 
inconceivable was the first ; how unbeliev- 
able the second, and yet how peremptory 
and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, 
have sterner accents affirmed the sover- 
eignty of impersonal and unrecompensing 
law. I listened, and night fell ; her grave, 



The Century in Literature 205 

majestic countenance turned towards me 
like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as 
though she withdrew from my grasp, one 
by one, the two scrolls of promise, and 
left me the third scroll only, awful with 
inevitable fates." * 

It is as her best interpreter has said: 
" We must conceive her as an expression 
of the spirit of the age out of which she 
grew." He who would gain a clear and 
unified idea of what the nineteenth cen- 
tury means in the development of English 
literature, can on the whole find it best 
embodied and exemplified in the wise, ear- 
nest, sombre writings of " George Eliot." 
And what a contrast to Lady Mary Mon- 
tagu! 

Pain is symptomatic of life. The eigh- 
teenth century, with all its gayety, was 
insensate ; the sad nineteenth century was 

* F. W. H. Myers, Essays. 



206 The Holy Grail 

at least alive. No one can gainsay that. 
And it was growing — growing towards a 
larger and a fuller life. It was sad be- 
cause it was a transitional age, but the 
transition was in the direction of the light. 
We who greet the twentieth century have 
our faces towards the sunshine, not the 
darkness. Our immediate forerunners 
made real progress in their struggles to- 
wards the light, and we are the heirs of 
their travail. The age that is coming, let 
us predict, will be no less wide in its 
knowledge, no less eager for wisdom, 
than the century just gone by, but it will 
be far less sad. Yet the incoming gladness 
will not be a mere childish joy, which has 
never known pain — such was the gayety 
of a hundred years ago ; it will be rather a 
deep and abiding peace, that has been won 
at the cost of tears; it will be the full 
gladness of manhood. There is a peace 
of the idler, we might almost say of the 



The Century in Literature 207 

coward, and there is the " peace with 

honor" of the man who has battled and 
won. " Blessed is he that overcomem." 
The glory of the nineteenth century is the 
heroic glory of an Abraham, " who 
against hope believed in hope," laying its 
embodied treasure on the altar at the be- 
hest of truth, and going out into far coun- 
tries of bewilderment for the sake of a fu- 
ture race, that all the families of the earth 
might eventually be called blessed, " the 
heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files 
of time." Nay, it is rather the splendid 
tragic glory of a Moses, leading the peo- 
ple out from the bondage of the idle flesh- 
pots, through the wilderness, to the verge 
of the Promised Land, whereinto the 
great lawgiver might not enter because 
a Joshua has been summoned as sup- 
planter. And the spokesman of this 
Joshua has already uttered the heartening 
cry of the herald. Just as Robert Burns 



208 The Holy Grail 

stood at the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury heralding the nineteenth, so Robert 
Browning lived in the nineteenth century, 
but was not truly of it, because this poet 
was also a prophet, living in advance of 
his age, believing that " the best is yet to 
be, the last of life, for which the first was 
made" — bidding us bravely " trust God; 
see all, nor be afraid!" Tennyson was" 
the chief poetical exponent of the present, 
but Browning was the prophet of the fu- 
ture. Tennyson had wide knowledge. 
He observed, and observed narrowly — 
" observed indeed with something akin to 
the trained scientific eye." Profoundly 
earnest was he also in his quest for truth, 
as all his lovers know. But unutterably 
sad ! One can see that he held to his creed 
of optimism only through sheer force of 
will power; even his optimism is sombre. 
His was " the field of that vague, word- 
less autumnal sadness that seems to have 



Century in Literature 209 

its source in a secret sympathy with some 
hidden sorrow lying deep in the heart of 
nature." Therefore he has been recog- 
nized as the greatest poet of his century, 
not only because of his supreme mastery 
of form, and other far greater qualities, 
but also because he was so utterly its 
mouthpiece. His words speed straight 
to the mark, they find immediate re- 
sponsiveness, they are seized upon and 
assimilated without effort. Browning's 
great message, however, overreaches us 
and eludes us, but we feel that the fault 
is not with him, it is with us — that he is 
speaking a truth so large and free that we 
have not yet grown quite great enough to 
grasp it. As one has most admirably 
said : " Tennyson clove the mark at which 
he aimed, but Browning's arrow, like that 
of the archer of ancient story, sped in an 
arc of light, beyond the ken of the gazers, 



210 Century in Literature 

to be lost in the overarching heaven." * 
Nay, not lost, but harbored for a heaven- 
lier race. With Browning there is all the 
wonderful wide scope of his contempora- 
ries, and all of their deep, earnest quest, 
but of sadness never a whit. Because he 
had somehow found! He drank from 
the true " chalice of the grapes of God," 
he saw the Grail unveiled. Therefore he 
stands, true herald of the dawn, with his 
mystical, matchless song — 

The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the morn; 
Morning's at seven ; 
The hill-side's dew-pearled; 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn ; 
God's in his heaven — 
All's right with the world! 

* Dixon, " A Tennyson Primer." 



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